


so, take me to the heavens now, as we burn down, as we are found

by starraya



Category: Holby City
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Historical AU, Hurt/Comfort, Period-Typical Homophobia, World War I, period lesbians, slow burn-y, tw: abortion, tw: depression, tw: emotional abuse, tw: loss of a child, tw: miscarriage, tw: references to domestic abuse, tw: references to physical abuse, tw: suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-10-26 14:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10788231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: The middle-aged lesbian titanic AU you never knew you needed until now.COMPLETE WITH NO DEAD LESBIANS.(If you can't believe this AU exists, trust me neither can I and I'm far more embarrassed about it than you.)





	1. Chapter 1

_10th April_

On the top deck of the ship, Bernie is lying on a bench. A cigarette in her hand, she blows out a mouthful of smoke. She watches it curl up before it dissipates into the cold, night air. She hears a pair of footsteps clatter past her. Heels, Bernie thinks. She sits up and turns just in time to see a woman in a red dress running past her, towards the stern.

The dress has a panel of delicate, black lace at the back of it – flowers, perhaps? Bernie tracks the movements of the woman with eyes, before she disappears of out her line of sight and Bernie follows her with her feet this time. It is flowers, Bernie sees. Patterns of flowers half-obscured by long, loose brown curls. She sees two bare arms clutching the wrong side of the railing. She sees the woman lean forward and hears her gasp for air. One long, deep intake. As if it’s her last.

“Now that’s an engine that whines and growls.”

“Stay back!” The woman’s head whips around at the sound of the stranger’s voice. Her brows knit together in confusion when she looks the stranger up and down. Their trousers and jacket and cap. She thought the voice was a woman’s.

“Nothing like the new motors,” Bernie edges forward, “one of the fastest engines in the world. The sharpest propellers too. Think you’ll miss those?”

The woman scrutinizes Bernie. The stranger’s odd words, it would seem, match their odd appearance. Trousers slightly too short. Sleeve jackets too long. Many a coil of thread unravelling at the ends of the worn, discoloured fabric.

“Funny,” Serena observes, “You don’t like a person who owns a motor.”

“And you,” Bernie inches even closer to the railings, “don’t look like a woman who is going to jump.”

“Stay away from me,” Serena warns, turning back to look into the dark depths of the Atlantic, “I mean it, or I’ll let go.”

“Look,” Bernie calls the woman’s attention back to her. She takes the cigarette from her mouth and flings it in the ocean. Bernie, with as much nonchalance as can muster up, shoves her hands in her pockets and sidles up to the rail, a couple of feet away from the woman. “No, you won’t.”

“What do you mean ‘no, I won’t’. You don’t know me. Don’t presume to tell me what I will and what I won’t do. Men do enough of that already, thank you very much.”

“I’m not a man.”

Serena turns around to Bernie. “You’re not?” Serena pauses, considers the stranger’s high cheekbones – cheekbones that look carved from marble, from glass, before shaking her head. “You’re distracting me. Go away. Go smoke another cigarette.”

“I can’t,” Bernie improvises, “I just gave up.” She never takes her eyes off the woman’s, brown and shining with tears. “It was my last one,” Bernie continues, hoping to keep the woman’s attention for as long as possible, hoping that she won’t turn back to the sea. “I’ve had that cigarette for two years/ I gave up smoking when I left America. Tore up every cigarette I had. Except that one. I thought I’d keep it as a symbol of, I don’t know . . . memory, of my old life back there.”

As symbols of memory go it’s a bit. . .” A tiny, unsteady laugh slips from Serena’s lips.

“A bit what?”

“Well you just threw your old life away,”

“I don’t want it anymore. Don’t need it.”

The woman’s gaze settles back on the sea. Her voice is little more than a whisper. “Same.”

“You let go,” Bernie promises, “and I’m going to have to jump in after you.”

“Don’t be absurd.” The woman watches Bernie shed her jacket. “The fall alone would kill you.”

“Perhaps,” Bernie shrugs. “I’ll take the chance.” Pulls off the jumper that was underneath her jacket. The shirt underneath is too big for her slim frame, but even the woman can see a suggestion of feminine curves through the fabric.

Bernie starts to unlace her boots. “But I do think you’re going a little too far to retrieve my cigarette. I mean I appreciate the gesture – “

“Oh, quiet.” The end of woman’s order is swallowed up by the laugh that bubbles in her throat. One she half-fails in tamping down.

“Look,” Bernie tries once more, “jumping isn’t going to solve anything. Whatever problem – “

“Who said there was a problem? Who said there was anything like that? There’s just . . . nothing.”

“No one who cares for you. No one left you care about. I’ve been there.”

“You have?”

“Past five years. But you need to hold on. Keep living. Because one day you will meet someone.”

“Who did you meet?”

“You.” Bernie kicks her boots to one side, next to her pile of clothing. “I told you I’ve been there and if you jump,” Bernie fights to keep her voice as steady and firm as the vows she repeats, “I’m jumping after you. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it though, what with how cold the water is and the propellers. The engine’s whining like mad.”

“Oh, will you bloody forget about the engine!”  The woman’s yells pierce the night air – and Bernie’s eardrum’s, almost.

Bernie’s heart is pounding, but she works to keep her voice level. Softly, she implores. “Come on. Give me your hand.”

The woman clasps her hand and slowly – the toes of her shoes just gripping the thin railing – twists fully around to face Bernie. A wave of relief rushes over Bernie.

“I’m Bernie Wolfe.”

“Serena Campbell.” Her eyes dart over Bernie’s body, over the strands of blonde hair tumbling from underneath her cap, her delicate cheekbones, the soft curves the jacket no longer disguises, the slender waist and slight, but definite, flare of hips. Serena studies Bernie’s face, her thin lips, her strong nose, her wide eyes. “You’re a woman.”

“Yes. I am.”

“A Berenice?”

“Yes.”

“Are you an actress?”

“No.”

“Then why do you go around in men’s clothes?”

“Several reasons, all of which I’ll happily explain to once and only once I have got you back safely on deck.”

“Well, then, Berenice . . .” Serena takes a breath and lets Bernie take both of her hands. She steps up. On the second to last rail, her foot catches in the hem of her dress. She tries to untangle it. Misses the narrow ridge of her railing. Falls. Screams. Bernie grips her hands, leans forward. “Come on,” she pulls up. “Come on!”

Serena tries to lift herself up. Her feet scramble for purchase on the railing. Slip again. One of her hands fly away from Bernie’s.

“Bernie!”

“Listen. Listen. I’ve got you, Serena, and I won’t let you go. Now pull yourself up. Come on!”

Serena climbs back up, wedges her feet on the railing. Wraps her arms tightly around Bernie. She stands on the second highest railing, panting. Bernie lifts her over, but Serena is taller than her now. When Bernie pulls Serena fully over, Bernie loses her balance and both crash down on the deck-floor, Bernie on top of Serena. She scrambles off Serena, leans back on her knees to check if the other woman’s okay. Trembling, Serena lies there on the deck and stares up at the night sky, just as Bernie had done minutes before.

Bernie reaches for Serena’s hand. Is about to ask if she’s alright. But the crew of the ship circle them before she can.

-

Sat at the vanity in a suite fit for royalty – Edward’s words – Serena scrutinises her reflection. Every wrinkle. Every line. The creases at the corners of her eyes and lips have doubled, she’s sure, in recent months. Her mother was fond of saying such.

_Stop frowning, Rena._

_I’m not frowning mother._

_Well, you’re not smiling._

_I suppose not._

_Oh, what have I done now? I suppose it’s all might fault that you’re all glum, though I can’t see why._

_It’s not . . . you haven’t . . . not everything is about you, mother._

And then the next day –

_What have you done with your hair?_

_I haven’t done anything with my hair._

_You have. You’re arranged it differently. It makes your cheeks look gaunt._

_I haven’t done anything with my hair._

_You haven’t been eating, have you? Silly girl._

_Haven’t the time._

_Oh, will you stop your whinging. Anyone would think it was you that was dying._

Serena pushes those memories back in her hand. Returns her focus to the mirror. Her hair is not as thick as it was once. There’s a thick streak of grey at her hairline – and many thinner strands woven amongst the rest of the brunette ones – that aren’t going away anytime soon. Serena tugs out her hairpins, grimacing as they catch on the lugs in her windswept hair.

Some days she wishes she could just cut it all off. Cut it as short as that woman’s. Cut it even shorter.

She’s tired of the maids brushing out her hair, painstakingly slow. Tired of them winding and winding it up into elaborate patterns, sticking hundreds of pins in it that pull strands of her hair away from her scalp in the most unnatural of directions. Serena’s tired of her hair, bound up in curls, weighing as heavy as an unwanted crown on her head. She opens the drawer next to her. Rummages for scissors. Finds none. Probably for the best. _Think of the scandal, darling._ Edward’s voice chips at the edge of her mind, sweet and condescending. _Think of the scandal._

Serena yanks hard at the last pin. It refuses to budge. She yanks again, before trying a different tactic and shaking it lose with a sigh. As she runs a hair bush through her hair,  thinks back on the day. _Now that’s an engine that whines and growls_. What a strange thing to say. _What a strange woman._ Noble, though. Irritatingly, so. _If you let go, I’ll have to jump in after you._ Endearing, so. And most definitely, foolishly, so. More reckless than brave. And here Serena was, alone in her large, luxurious suite, readying for bed as usual – owing more than a thank you to the woman. The woman who dressed in men’s clothes. Strange, yes, but then Serena had just been struck with a desire to lop off most of her hair, and earlier that evening, clutching the railings to . . .

 -

The crew mistook Bernie for a man. She hastily shoved her hair under her cap and threw back on her jacket as the crew helped Serena to her feet. They recognised her as Edward Campbell’s wife and called him from their cabin.  The crew had heard Serena’s screams and thought Bernie had – God knows what they thought.

Edward marched up to Bernie, a vein throbbing on his forehead. “How dare you!”

Now that’s something that whines and growls, Serena wanted to tell Bernie. To laugh with her about it.

“This is completely unacceptable,” Edward fumed, “what made you think that you could put your hands on my wife?”

Serena clasped her hands tightly together. How lovely of him to remember that little detail, after all this time. _My wife._

“Listen to me, you filth." Edward grabbed the lapels of Bernie’s jacket.

Serena sprung forward. “It was an accident,” she explained. She was leaning too far over the railings, Silly really. Looking at the propellers, marvelling at the engines. That’s how she’d slipped. And luckily, Mr Wolfe was on hand. He rescued her. Almost went over himself.

When asked, Bernie didn’t tell the crew members any different. She agreed, that’s how it went. The crew said Bernie was a hero, then, if that was the case. They uncuffed her and Serena gave a tiny, grateful smile to Bernie.

Serena's smile at the memory quickly leaves her face when she sees, in the mirror, Edward behind her. Frowning at her.

“I know you’ve been melancholy. I don’t pretend to know completely why.” Edward moves close to Serena. Puts his hands on the back of her chair.

She doesn’t turn around to him, just lowers her hairbrush and bites back an acerbic laugh. “Well, losing one’s mother normally does the trick, Edward.”

“Yes, but I thought you were . . ."

Serena stares at the reflection of her husband behind her. Arches an eyebrow at him.

“Relieved,” he finishes.

“Are you?”

“Well, she was . . . difficult.”

“Drew attention to herself, didn’t she? To this family. The wrong kind."

“Exactly,” Edward agrees, not detecting the irony in Serena’s tone. Or the exhaustion. He simply perches on the side of the table. “I had intended to save this until we were settled in America, but I thought tonight . . .” He retrieves a box from his jacket and opens it.

"Good gracious,” are the only words Serena can manage as she runs her eyes over the glittering necklace.

“Perhaps as a reminder of my feelings for you.” Without her permission, Edward unclasps the necklace around Serena’s neck – the one she wears every day, the one her mother gave her on her 16th birthday, the one that has been passed down in her family for generations through the female line– and Edward replaces it with the new one.

"A diamond," he boasts, "56 carat." Edward traces a finger over Serena’s the spot between her collarbones, down to the top of the diamond. "So, what do you think?"

When Serena doesn't respond, his hand drops from her throat. He grabs her hand and squeezes it.

"This is a new start for us, darling. New country. New home. All those past . . . difficulties . . . we can put them behind us. In America, you'll want for nothing. There's nothing I couldn't give you now.”

Now his uncle's money has finally come through, Serena thinks, now Edward has wrangled the fortune through all the necessary, time-consuming legalities. No wonder Edward's grinning. He nearly gambled away all their money six months ago.

 _I’ve never gambled before, not properly. Never for high stakes. It was one time. One unfortunate incident,_ he grovelled to Serena afterwards. _I don’t know what came over me._

 _A barrel of whiskey, no doubt,_ Serena retorted.

She can smell it on his breath now.

"This is a new start Serena," he leans in closer to her, "for the both of us." She knows her silence is grating on him. What did he want? For her to swoon at such a grand gesture, kiss him a hundred times, fall to his feet in thanks?

"I hope you won't keep this – whatever this is – up when we're in America,” Edward groans. “We'll have new neighbours. It'll be a whole new society out there. Of course, we will have to make our mark. I mean we'll already royalty compared to all those nouveau riche chaps .  . . what I'm saying is, it wouldn't hurt for you to crack a smile Serena. This is a new start for us."

"Yes, I believe you've said that three times now."

Edward sighs and stands up. "What more do you want from me?" He claps his hands by his side and storms out.

After he leaves, Serena touches her throat. Presses her fingertips to the cold gleam of the diamond. She murmurs a line from a sonnet she remembers. _And graven with diamonds in letters plain, there is written, her fair neck round about, Noli me tangere, for Ceasar's I am._

 _Touch me not, for I belong to someone else_. Serena tugs the necklace loose. Tosses it on the table as if it is a hot coal.

The jewel lands with a thud. She doesn’t go to check it. Diamonds are meant to be indestructible after all. Beauty that is frozen and never ages. She doesn’t even bother to put it in the safe, even though Edward would expect her to. These little rebellions against her husband are all she can muster up the energy for. In the past, she had no problem with telling Edward exactly what she thought. She took joy in wiping that sickeningly sweet grin off his face.

Now, the constant arguments, the constant battles that characterised their last decade of marriage, they just aren’t worth the effort. Serena is well accustomed to Edward’s gestures by now – granted, none of them before took the form of a 56-carat diamond – but they are, at their core, the same. His gifts are merely tokens of apology, not affection. They are about as sincere as his words. And the more expensive the gift, the grander his words – _a new start for the both of us_ – the shorter the amount of time before he falls off the wagon again. Breaks his promises to her.

His gestures are tawdry. They are empty, and, in turn, they make Serena feel the same. But she should expect no less. Her and Edward, they have perfected this little charade of marriage now. And there is no way for Serena to break herself out of it.

She spares one last glance at her tired reflection – the grey circles under her eyes and the lines on her forehead that reveal her 44 years – before making her way to the bed that Edward might stumble into at four in the morning, reeking of alcohol and the perfume of whatever foolish girl he had worked his charm on. Hopefully, Serena thinks, as she wraps the covers around her body, he’ll be too intoxicated, like he was last night, to make it back to their room. (Tomorrow morning, she will find him snoring on the chaise in the sitting room of their cabin.)

Serena closes her eyes. Stretches out and curls up her body up. She listens to the sounds of the ship taking her to America, to this new start she doesn’t want. The engines aren't working as hard as they do in the daytime, but, she must admit, she can detect a whining – and occasionally, perhaps, a deeper noise, like a growl emitting from the bowels of the ship. Bernie was right.

Earlier that evening, the crew pushed Edward to reward the hero that had saved his wife. He thought a twenty should do it. Serena asked him if that was all he thought his wife's life was worth. She knew, that surrounded by the crew, Edward would feel that he could do nothing put keep up appearances. He was a man of standing, after all. Could he not spare a little show of gratitude?

Begrudgingly, he invited Bernie to dinner with them tomorrow evening. Bernie paused before accepting the offer, a strange smirk – one only Serena caught – flickering over her lips and sparkling in her eyes. Edward arm seizes Serena’s waist and he guides them back to the dining hall – the room Serena had run out of, knowing Edward was distracted flirting with a girl and wouldn’t notice her absence for a while, and if he did, merely thank his stars that he had free rein to woo whatever girl he wanted without the inconvenience of his wife in the room because Serena had retired to their cabin early from a headache.

He never questions her headaches. Edward takes it as an umbrella term, covert and discrete, for the mysterious troubles women of Serena’s age go through. Sometimes Serena’s excuse for privacy is because of her skin flushing uncomfortably hot as if she is standing in front of a blazing fire. Sometimes it is just a means to stop Edward from drunkenly advancing on her in the small hours of morning and her having to push him off her, until he flops pathetically down next to her and snores. Women her age, their bodies change. They are no longer fertile, so of course there is no need for a sexual appetite. That’s what Edward probably believes, and Serena must partly agree. She certainly has no sexual appetite left for him.

Sometimes, the headaches, are just an excuse for solitude.

Last night it was a cover so Edward wouldn’t follow her to the stern of the ship.

As Edward led her way from it last night, she told him that she had felt ill and gone out onto the deck for the fresh sea air. He believed her. He rubbed her back and said he hoped she felt better. He knew they were still under the watch of the crew members.

Serena thought of Bernie watching her and Edward. _Would she see through it?_ Serena turned her head for one last glance of the woman, but she was conversing with one of the crew members with her back towards Serena.

Edward deposits her at the door of their cabin and leaves her to go and re-join their party at the dining table. He doesn’t notice the tear in the skirt of her dress, from where she her heel caught in the fabric before she lost her grip on the railings.

But one of the crew members did when he ran to her aid.

“Funny,” he remarked to Bernie, when Edward had taken Serena away, “the lady says she fell so suddenly but,” the man nodded to Bernie’s abandoned clothes, “you still had time to take off your shoes. Apart from tomorrow’s dinner, I think it best you stay from the lady for the rest of the journey, don’t you?”

He crosses his arms and strides off without waiting for an answer. And Bernie, over the course of the next couple of days, will think back to this conversation – this order to stay away from one Serena Campbell – and remember how she never promised anything.

11th April

“I saw that!”

Slightly sheepishly Bernie pivots around to face Serena, the incriminating item between two fingers.

“I haven’t lit it yet.”

“I thought you threw every single one you had away,” Serena levels. She knows many a people smoke – and as dreadful a habit as it sometimes appears to her, the way she has seen it alters someone’s voice and give them terrible coughing fits later in life, not to mention the fact that cigarette smoke is another smell she associates with Edward’s three o’clock drunken intrusions into their bedroom – she herself has smoked. She frequently stole Edward’s cigarettes, in fact, back when they were in England.

It isn’t the habit she teases Bernie for, not even the breaking of her promise to give up smoking – whatever the reason she made for it – no it is Bernie’s lie that she had threw every cigarette she owed away that grates on Serena.

A lie Bernie quickly refutes. “One of the crew members offered it me last night," she explains, "he thought it might calm the nerves after . . . what happened. Last one,” she holds her hands up, laughing, “I promise.”

“Don’t worry,” Serena reassures, “I can keep a secret.”

“Likewise,” Bernie smiles warmly. Tells Serena, with only one word and one smile, that she will keep the true events of last night to herself with the utmost discretion.

“Shall we?” Serena waves her arm, motioning to the other passengers traversing the deck.

Bernie nods and pockets her unlit cigarette.

As they stroll forward, side by side, both struggle to think how to strike up polite conversation. How to do so, and avoid touching upon all of unanswered questions that hang in the air between them. Why does Bernie dress like a man? What kind of woman is she to do that?

Why, last night, did she find Serena over the other side of the railings and wanting to let go?

Eventually, Bernie remembers the man the crew member had called for, an Edward Campbell.

“So,” Bernie breaks the silence, “how long have you been married?”

“Too long,” Serena chuckles.

“Are you travelling with anyone else? Friends? Family?”

“No, just us.” Serena is quick to hide the frown that flits across her face. She turns to face Bernie. “What about you?”

“My family?”

"Your fellow travellers. And, I suppose, that too?"

"Just me."

"Oh," Serena slows down.

“I mean, I have family,” Bernie rushes to clarify, “but they’re back in England, and I’m . . .”

“Here?” Serena offers. Bernie nods.

“I can’t help but notice,” Serena continues. “Your wedding ring is on the wrong finger.”

She doesn’t miss a trick, Bernie thinks. Toys with the ring on finger.

"Widowed?" Serena asks.

 "Divorced,” Bernie admits, “or at least in the process.”

“Honestly?”

"Why? Are you shocked?"

"No."

“You mustn’t hear a lot of it in your . . . circles,” Bernie tries as best she can to brush over the glaringly obvious, the fact that two classes on board the ship – and since she’s left Marcus, two classes in real life – separate her and Serena, and Serena is in the higher.

“You’d be surprised,” Serena arches an eyebrow.

“Then it must not be talked of favourably.”

“The woman involved isn’t often, no,” Serena agrees. Her voice drips with irony. “The newspapers pass little judgement on the man. _How strange_?”

"Well it was my doing, not Marcus's.” Bernie eyes drop to the floor, and even though Serena doesn’t believe her, she senses Bernie’s discomfort and doesn’t press her.

“I suppose, though now,” Serena comments, “you have the freedom to go where you want.”

“There is that. No ties. No duties. Just me.”

“Like Ibsen’s Nora, after she left the doll house.”

Serena can tell from Bernie’s face that she has never watched the play.

“The play was marvellous," she tells Bernie, "I went to see it twice. There were riots. Nothing like the dullness of opera, which Edward loves, and I absolutely loathe. In my youth, I used to go the music halls. Watch the acts where the women pretended to be swells and woo their sweethearts. They used to cut their hair short and wear suits.”

“I told you, I’m not an actress. I just – if you were a woman, on her own, travelling across the globe, you’d understand.”

“I understand now.” Bernie’s heart quickens at Serena’s words. Could she possibly have guessed? Her fears prove unfounded when Serena goes on to explain, dropping her voice low so will no one will hear them discuss such a scandalous topic.  

“I mean, I always wanted to try those bloomers all the daring girls would wear to play sport.”

“Well,” Bernie whispers, “you should try trousers.” They both erupt into laughter. Bernie, for one, can’t believe Serena’s boldness, but she likes it.

“I haven’t laughed like that in years,” Serena remarks, wiping away from a tear in her eye. She looks up to find herself beneath Bernie’s imploring gaze. “Last night, when you –”

Serena cuts off her question. She reaches down and snatches the sketchbook Bernie has been holding in one hand during their walk. “What’s this?” She asks, voice shrill and overeager, as if the sketchbook is the only thing she cares about in the world. “What are you? An artist or something?”

Panic seizes Bernie as Serena sits down on a deckchair, the stolen sketchbook in her lap. She flips it open and flicks through the pages. Her eyes scan rapidly over the numerous sketches. Her eyes widen. All of the drawings are real life. All of the bodies are partially or fully nude.

All of them are of women.


	2. Chapter 2

“Well,” Serena breathes out, “these . . . are quite something.” She continues to flick through the pages, as if completely unperturbed, but when another passenger walks by she closes the sketchbook lightning-quick and reopens it only when the passenger is far away.

Bernie sits down on the edge of the deckchair next to Serena.

“In Paris, I –” Bernie stumbles over an explanation for the drawings, but her mouth turns dry. She feels her cheeks burn as she watches Serena trace her fingertips over the naked torso of a woman.

“You like this woman,” Serena observes, “you used her several times. “If you were a man, I’d wonder if you had a love affair with her.” Serena dares to glance sideways at Bernie.

Bernie’s silence is an answer in itself.

Serena clears her throat, before shutting the book. She hands it back to Bernie and stands up. She smooths down her dress with her hands.

“Serena?” Bernie jumps to her feet.

“I have to – I have to go.”

Flustered, Serena grasps for Bernie’s hand. “Bernie . . . Miss Wolfe,” she rambles as she shakes Bernie’s hand, “it’s been a pleasure. I sought you out to thank you and now I have thanked you –”

“No, you haven’t.”

“What?”

“You haven’t thanked me.”

“I haven’t? Well,” Serena continues to shake Bernie’s hand, “thank you, for what you did, and after . . . for your discretion – “

“You’re very welcome,” Bernie smiles, her eyes warm and sparkling. Serena is annoyed by the amusement in them. What’s so funny? She looks down at their hands, still enjoined despite the handshake having finished. For the first time since she reached for Bernie’s hand, Serena registers the feeling of Bernie’s fingers curling around her own. Her bare fingers pressing into the smooth fabric of Serena’s white glove.

“Right, well, I’m leaving now,” Serena proclaims.

“Right,” Bernie echoes, still grinning. Serena draws her hand back and Bernie can see she’s about to leave.

“The woman,” she tells Serena, “I haven’t seen her in years.”

“I – I didn’t ask.”

“But your eyes did.”

Serena scoffs. “There you go again, presuming what I think and feel, well let me tell you – “

“I know you’re unhappy and I know you don't want to talk about it.”

“Oh, so, she does have some sense,” Serena jibes, before squeezing her eyes shut and pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose.

“Sorry.” She sinks down on the deckchair next to her, a few feet away from Bernie. “I thanked you, but I haven’t really shown you any gratitude, have I? Insulting you. Stealing your sketchbook.”

“If you wanted to see it,” Bernie moves to sit down on the deckchair next to her. “You need only have asked.”

Serena laughs, weakly, at that, before turning to face Bernie. “You said you drew them in Paris?”

“Yes. I lived there for a while.”

“My mother loved Paris. She took me there when I was 17. We went to the tower and eat in all the little cafés. It was beautiful.”

“I’m certain you didn’t go to the parts I did.” 

"Probably not,” Serena agrees with a small chuckle. “The only naked women I saw were in the galleries.”

“Definitely not, then.”

“So,” Serena shifts in her seat, “did you draw for a living?” Bernie shakes her head. “For leisure?” Serena guesses.

“I worked as a doctor.”

“Really?” Serena gasps.

“But you’re – “

Serena gestures to Bernie’s shabby clothes, for loss of a polite way to say whilst she didn’t look like a mechanic, she definitely doesn’t look like a doctor. Bernie reopens her sketchbook, but turns instantly to the page at the back. There is a naked form of a women, or at least part of one. The sketch is from her neck to her hips. Her body is labelled neatly, like a diagram. Bernie shows Serena the next page. Again, it is the middle of a woman, but it is her skeleton. Some of her ribcage is missing, revealing an intricately drawn heart beneath. On the next page, there is a leg, each muscle carefully mapped out and, again, labelled. 

"These are . . .” Serena takes the sketchbook from Bernie and flicks back to the sketch of the woman’s heart. “They’re beautiful, Bernie. You have an extraordinary talent.”

She plays with her necklace. “My father was a doctor. I wanted to follow in his footsteps."

"You’re pulling my leg.” Bernie can’t imagine the woman in front of, in her perfectly pressed green dress and white pristine gloves, in a hospital. Amongst all the blood and death.

“No, truly. I used to sneak into my father's study and steal his books." Serena pinches the tip of her middle finger and draws off her right glove, before peeling off the other one and laying them both in her lap.

"Bones of the hands," Serena says, picking up Bernie’s hand and tracing her fingers along it. "Carpal bones, proximal row, scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, distal row, trapezium, capitate, hamate, then the metacarpal bones, proximal, middle, distal."

“Consider me put in my place. You must of stole a lot of books.”

"My mother was furious when she found out. I was meant to be studying at the piano, and to this day I still can’t play more than a few notes. She said I’ve never get a husband if I didn’t do as I was told. Edward was training to be a doctor when we got married, but he gave it up. He only saw it as a pastime and when he came into his father's fortune, he didn't want the effort of it."

"My husband, Marcus, was a Doctor. We ran a clinic together."

“And he didn’t mind? That you were equals?”

“Not at the start," Bernie recalls. "He loved the study of medicine. So did I. Sometimes I think that’s the only reason we got married. But the patients preferred him. They didn’t want a female doctor. A few told me it was unnatural. I was unnatural."

“It can’t have been easy.”

“Working as a doctor or working with your husband? We’d only had the clinic three months when we began to argue over patients," Bernie explains. "Methods. Surgeries. Marcus wanted to do it one way, I another.”

“And I suppose his word was the final one?”

“It became his clinic, not mine. So, I left. When the Boer war broke out, I joined the Army Nursing Service. They wouldn’t take me on as a doctor, only as a matron but I preferred it to the clinic. Everyone working together for a common cause. We were all too busy trying to keep soldiers alive for petty arguments.”

“You sound like you miss it.”

“More than I miss my old life. Marcus ordered me not to became an army nurse. He said if I truly saw myself as his wife, then I would listen to him. I went and never returned to the clinic.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that."

-

Bernie’s appearance is immaculate. Her suit pressed. Collar a spotless white. When Serena sees her before dinner, she loses her voice. By the time, she finds the words she wants to say to Bernie, all of them about the suit, Edward appears at her side. Takes Serena's arm. “Shall we?”

Serena resents Edward the entire night for stealing that moment from them – that chance to speak together. Bernie is seated away from her, three seats across from her on the same side and Serena must crane her neck to see her. There are several conversations going on the table and Serena is surrounded by the one that is not Bernie’s. She hardly eats, too busy straining her ear to catch Bernie’s stories of the Boer war. Bernie doesn’t say, but her dinner companions assume she was a soldier. She details the horrors of war – all Serena imagines she’s seen first-hand as a nurse – and holds half the table in rapt attention.

When Bernie is asked why she is on the ship, she tells how it was luck. She won the ticket gambling. The same day as departure. It is during this story that Edward decides to turn to Serena, forcing her attention away from Bernie. He asks her how she finds the fish. If it’s no good, he’ll have them get her another. No, Serena refuses. And, even though it tastes like dust in her mouth, begins to eat the salmon. She is sure if she didn’t Edward would make good on his offer, call a butler and make a show of critiquing the food. Of demanding better service. And getting it. He would do it to show that it was just a thing that a man of his status could do at whim.

When Edward leaves her alone and Serena can once again focus on the conversation, it is no longer Bernie’s voice leading it. It has turned to money. What a surprise. Bernie doesn’t tell another story for the rest of the night.

When the men rise to leave for cigars and brandy, Serena desperately wishes Bernie dressed as a woman so she could stay with them. Instead of departing with the other men though, she excuses herself.

As she passes Serena at the end of the table she briefly takes her hand and thanks her for the invitation. After she leaves, Serena lowers her hand under the table, uncurls her fingers and reads Bernie’s note. Shortly after, she excuses herself too.

“Another headache?” Edward taunts her, his voice clearly tired and tired with her. "A stomach pain? A sickness?"

“I think,” Serena concludes, “that it was the fish.”

-

The noise from steerage is deafening. Shouting, laughing, howling, chanting. The hammer of hundreds of footsteps on the floor. Serena nearly turns back at the sight of the crowded room, the people dancing in tight clusters, circling around and around, to the lively strum of guitars and whistles of flutes. The place reeks of beer. People are drinking it by the barrel. Every one that isn’t dancing seems to hold a glass.

Bernie offers her one with a smile when she spots Serena. Serena takes a sip and grimaces, happily passes it back to Bernie. Bernie places Serena’s glass on the table next to them. She offers Serena her hand.

“Fancy a dance?”

Serena doesn’t need asking twice.

-

Serena falls into bed with a pleasant weariness in her bones and aching feet she will curse tomorrow morning.

That night she dreams of Bernie in the suit. Jacket discarded. The top buttons of her shirt undone and her bowtie hanging lose around her neck.

She dreams of Bernie sitting atop of her, knees either side of her waist. She imagines she can feel the strength in Bernie’s thighs.

Serena imagines herself fully-clothed and she imagines Bernie undressing her, drawing off the glove from Serena’s hand – red in colour, one Serena has never seen before, one she does not own. Serena imagines the fabric slipping from her skin, until her hand is bare. She imagines Bernie curling her fingers around Serena’s, taking her hand and raising it to her lips, before drawing a finger into her mouth, then another.

She imagines Bernie releasing her hand and guiding it down to the wetness between her thighs.

Only then does Serena register that the dream has altered. Bernie is naked. They both are.

Serena jolts awake, panting, to find her hand between her own thighs. She pulls it away. Turns to her side. Tries to regulate her breathing, before climbing out of bed to search the drawers for a towel to wet and press against her hot skin. She doesn’t find one. Instead, she finds clothes she hasn’t worn in years. After Elinor she lived in black, didn’t need to change into it after her mother’s passing, and it is only now, abroad the ship, that she has started to add different colours to her wardrobe. She searches under the clothes for a towel.

She finds red gloves.

-

_12th April_

The next morning Edward confronts her before she can go down to the dining hall for breakfast. He stops her in the corridor outside their room. Blocks her path.

“I know you were with him last night. Your friend. People saw you together. What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“Having fun,” Serena replies. She tries to get past Edward, but he won’t move.

“Having fun,” he sneers. “You haven’t smiled in months. Before we boarded this ship, you used to sleep for weeks. You couldn’t even get out of bed.”

“And now, I’m having fun. Isn’t that what you do with your . . .” Serena pauses, contemplates a polite term for his many lovers, before deciding on “friends?"

“Well maybe if you bothered to open your legs."

“Well, maybe,” Serena answers blithely, looking past him over his shoulder, at the path he still won’t let her take, “if you weren’t such an incompetent lover.”

Edward grabs her wrist with one hand. Raises his other. Stops his flattened palm from reaching her cheek at the last moment. Instead, he draws back his hand and curls his fist into a tight ball, his face red and a vein in his forehead bulging.

“You need to stop whatever it is you’re playing at,” he warns her.

Serena snatches her wrist from his grip and rubs it. Straightens her shoulders and tilts her head up. “Tell me why.”

“You, foolish woman, you don’t know?” Edward chides her, leaning in until his mouth is at her ear. “You said it yourself at our daughter’s funeral. It should have been you.”

Serena stands silent as he strides away, down the corridor, towards the dining hall. He calls back. “I’ll tell them you have a headache, again, shall I?”

Serena pushes down the handle of the door next to her and drifts, without thinking, towards the chair at her vanity. This time she finds the scissors. She lifts them to her hair. To chin-level. She looks at her eyes in the mirror. They have no tears in them. She lowers the scissors a fraction. Presses the cold metal to her neck. Holds her breathe. She twists to one side and hurls the scissors at the wall.

-

“Serena. Serena?”

Serena pretends she can't hear Bernie's calls, strides across the deck quicker and quicker, but when Bernie - damn her longs legs - catches up with her and appears beside her, Serena can no longer ignore her.

"I was tying to catch you."

"Well, you have," Serena replies curtly, still striding on, forcing Bernie to keep up the pace with her. "What is it you want?"

"Why are you being like this?"

"This had to end," she declares. Whatever this is."

"Has Edward said something?"

Serena ignores Bernie's question. Keeps striding on forward, looking at her feet. "Last night was a one time thing. Surely you aren't under any illusions that it wasn't?"

"Did he find out that I was a woman? Did you tell him?"

"Of course not," Serena snaps, amazed Bernie would think she would. She raises her eyes from the floor. Finds a couple of passengers staring at them. Without realising it, she has been raising her voice, straining it in agitation and Bernie has been doing the same, each of them trying to overlap the other.

They are drawing attention to themselves.

"Please, leave me alone." Serena quickens her pace, until she is almost running away, but Bernie follows her. Serena realises this isn't a fight she is going to win like this and when she spots an open door, she pulls Bernie into it with her. Is relieved to find the room empty.

"We can't meet anymore. It isn't right."

"Because I'm a woman?"

"No, because it's . . . " Serena rubs one of her hands against the other, trying to search for the words. "Because I shouldn't have sought you out yesterday. I shouldn't have gone with you last night."

"But you enjoyed it," Bernie counters.

"Like I said, last night was a one time thing."

"You don't think you should enjoy yourself again?"

"What?"

"You don't think you deserve to?"

"That's nonsense," Serena protests. "You're putting words into my mouth."

"Because you do." Bernie goes to take her hands, but Serena steps back before she can.

"Please," she pleads, her voice quieter than it has been throughout their entire argument, "please just stop."

Serena turns to the door, partly because she feels tears began to burn in her eyes and she doesn't want Bernie to see them fall, and partly because she feels that if she stays another moment with Bernie, she won't have the strength do to what she needs to do. To make her voice final and direct. Absolute.

"Don't follow me."

It is an order. She leaves without looking back at Bernie.

-

_13th April_

“Are you following me?” Serena arches an eyebrow when she reaches the bow of the ship and discerns Bernie's silhouette against the setting sun.

Bernie pivots on foot. “Since I was up here first, I rather think I should be asking you that question."

“I needed some air.”

“I hear they have that inside too,” Bernie quips. 

“Fresh air,” Serena clarifies, annoyed.

“Not going to try and jump off this side of the ship, are you?”

Serena darts her head around to see if any other passengers are around to hear Bernie’s voice. Thankfully, they are alone. But still Serena drops her voice to a whisper, low and hissing. “What a thing to joke about.”

“I wasn’t joking. I’m concerned about you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. Besides, you needn’t be. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We’re perfect strangers.”

“I suppose,” Bernie concurs, “but I know you’re lost, and the night we met you thought you’d never find your way again.”

Serena steps forward. Stands beside Bernie. Grips tightly at the railings with both her hands.

“You said,” she turns towards the sea to avoid Bernie’s eye contact. “You said that you were like me once.”

“I was,” Bernie turns around to the sea and looks out herself. “When I was younger, something happened to me. Something I thought I’d never get over. So, I didn’t try to do. I just blocked it out. But then I saw it happen again, to another person. The memories, the pain was so much I felt like I couldn’t breathe, so I left. Left England. Left my husband. Moved to Italy. Then Germany, and finally Paris.”

“You ran away?”

“Yes, at the start. But I found a reason to stop running.”

“The woman in your drawings?”

"Alex, she was one of the reasons, yes, I suppose. But I think I was truly happy in Paris because I was working again. Saving lives. Helping people. I felt like I’ve destroyed so much, it felt good to fix something at last.”

“Why did you leave then?”

“Why without Alex?” Bernie asks.

“Yes.”

“If I tell you the reason, you’ll find it strange.”

“Bernie, you dress in men’s clothes and I know you lived with another woman. I hardly think you’re going to have go running for the smelling salts after you tell me whatever it is.”

“Alex wanted a child.”

“Oh. Well, that is . . . ”

“We had a close friend," Bernie recounts. "A man we shared our apartment with. They wanted to raise the baby together. All three of us.”

Serena is lost for words, momentarily. It is a strange arrangement, yes. She’s certainly never heard of anything like it before.

“Shocked?”

“A bit, but many women have a child without a man and the woman alone must fend for the child, but more often than not she can find reputable work. She falls into difficult . . . circumstances,” Serena says. “I think, Bernie, that a child with two mothers is not as strange as an idea as everyone on this ship would think it. There are many children in this world who are unloved or abandoned, but there are also loving mothers who were abandoned with child. Women who waited for men who promised they would return or who were rejected by their families and thrown out of their home. They face penury day after day, and so does their child. One cannot feed a child on love alone.”

“Do you have children?”

“You mean did I birth one out of wedlock? No.”

“So, you do?”

“Why did you not want them? Why did you run again?”

“Alex wanted a child so badly. I felt trapped.”

“And now you're free? I feel like an animal on this ship, transported from one cage to the next.”

“Then," Bernie suggests, "step out it. When we arrive in America – ”

Serena raises her eyes from the sea and turns to face Bernie. Finds Bernie's eyes fixed on her intently.

“You make it sound simple. Where would I go? I couldn’t do it, not alone.”

“I did.”

“You’re different to me. You’re brave. I’m not.”

“You didn’t jump.”

“Yes, but you stopped me."

Bernie shakes her head. She places her hand on Serena's. “You stopped yourself," Bernie tells Serena. "You were the only one who could.”

Serena eyes flicker away from the intensity of Bernie's gaze, flit down to their hands. When she looks back up, her eyes settle on Bernie's lips. She wonders how soft they would feel. What they would taste like.

In the distance, a man shouts.

They don't know who draws their hand back first, but they do, in an instant. They turn to find the deck empty, though. It could have been a member of the crew. Anyone. Nothing to do with them.

Serena steps back from Bernie. "I should be going."

"They'll expect you for dinner."

Serena nods. "Tomorrow," she tells her. “In the morning, before lunch, come to my cabin." Serena can't help the nervous smile that upturns the corners of her lips. "I want you to draw me."

When Serena turns to depart, Bernie eyes follow her figure, just like they did the first night they met, but this time she watches Serena disappear into the heart of the ship, inside of run from it. This time she can slowly rake her eyes down Serena's body. Track the subtle movements of her limbs under the constricting fabric of her long dress. Bernie's eyes skim down, from Serena's back to her thighs to her calves to her ankles. She can just catch sight of a sliver of skin between the hem of her dress and her shoes. 

In her dreams, that night, she replicates the image in her mind: she mentally draws out the curves of Serena's body.

She imagines the line of delicate black buttons she saw at the back of Serena's dress. She imagines unbuttoning them and slipping the dress off Serena's shoulders. She imagines her hands settling on the laces of her corset. She imagines untying them.

Bernie wakes up in the morning, sheets twisted around her flushed body. She throws on clothes. Grabs her sketchbook and pencils.

All night her mind has been racing with the question of how Serena wants Bernie to draw her, and now she will finally know the answer.

It is as she suspected. As she hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make me day (and are super motivating).


	3. Chapter 3

_14th April_

Serena swallows thickly. She curses the tremble in her hands as she unties the sash of her dressing gown. She asked for Bernie to draw her, after all. Like this. Still, she frets. What on earth is she playing at? A woman of her age and standing, she should know better than to fan the flames . . . the flames of . . . she doesn’t know exactly what of, if she’s honest.

Serena has had affairs, fleeting affairs. Ones that never grew past more than a spark, never lasted. Her and Edward’s marriage hasn’t been a marriage for a long time. And it’s his doing – even if the first time Serena kissed another man, as very much Edward’s lawfully wedded wife, she felt a twist of guilt in her stomach. Did it make her just as bad as him? Did it absolve him? Did it put some of the blame for their disintegrating marriage on her?

She has long stopped caring about the answers. Besides, the affairs never lasted. The excitement of them quickly faded after a couple of nights spent in the arms of another man. If the men weren’t married, some asked her to elope with them. To leave Edward and their home. But Serena always refused. She had never worked. Had little money to support herself. No security. She didn’t feel like abandoning herself to the protection of a man she barely knew, relying on him for support that he could easily take away at whim.

In her affairs, she was always discreet. Unlike Edward. Serena was sure half the town where they lived knew of Edward’s infidelities. He probably never felt an ounce of shame. He probably comforted himself with the idea, as he continued his liaisons with strings of handsome, young girls, that women past childbearing age, like Serena, rather didn’t care for any of that since they had become quite dead from the waist down and quite unbothered by it.

More fool Edward.

Serena sought the intimacy and passion, if only for a night or two, that had left their marriage. Edward wanted her, on occasion, but she can’t remember a time, in the last ten years, he wasn’t drunk when he did. The men she had affairs with, they weren’t bad lovers. They made her feel good, for a couple of hours, made her feel desired. But she can’t throw off the thought that her husband of twenty five years never wants her, unless he is stonking drunk. It has become easier to refuse him, what with her growing older, what with her women’s problems.

But she’s sure he’s felt the injustice of her refusals. If your own wife wouldn’t give it you, why not seek it out elsewhere? But, of course, Edward had been doing just that for a long time before Serena thought their marriage a disaster. Before their relationship broke beyond repair.

No, as she fumbles with the sash of her gown, she realises that it isn’t any sense of duty towards Edward that bothers her. If never did to stop her sleeping with other men. There’s more risk with _this –_ this being whatever is happening between her and Bernie. On this ship, Serena lives in such close quarters to hundreds of other people, and she is never too far from Edwards eyes. It’s dangerous, but there’s a thrill that comes with the danger, Serena won’t lie. There's probably rumours about her and Bernie already. Rumours they can't change now.

In two weeks’ time, she will be in America, shackled to a new life she doesn’t want. She is 44 and not getting any younger. In two years’ time, her wits might turn like her mother’s did. More reason to seize whatever thrill possible out of her life. For years and years now she has dressed in black. Surely, for a moment, she can change out of it?

Do something she wants. And she does want this - whatever it is with Bernie. She wants her. Last night and the night before she dreamt about wanting her.

She wants her. Wants this. And why think past that? She can’t. She’s driven by a force, unknown but not unwelcome, when it comes to wanting to be close to Bernie. Serena lets it overpower her doubts. She shrugs off her dressing gown. Reclines on the chaise and calls Bernie back in the room.

“I was worried there that . . .” Bernie falters. All thoughts about the length of time Serena took to undress, about thinking she might have, for whatever reason, left – and that Bernie would return to an empty room – all those thoughts vanish when she sees Serena. The sight Bernie has imagined, but that doesn’t come any where near to her fantasy.

Serena can’t help the self-consciousness that creeps over her. Not when Bernie’s staring at her so . . . openly. She has thrown one arm back, out of the way. The other arm she left lying over her stomach – over the stretch-marks there – but it doesn’t cover much and Serena’s arms itch to wrap around her middle. The years have made it softer and rounder than it once was, but what is the point in pretending they haven’t? She fights back the urge to snatch the dressing grown back up and cover herself up. To say this was a silly idea. To tell Bernie to go.

But Serena knows that is the last thing she wants.

Something, burning hot, shoots through her veins, spreads underneath her skin when Bernie makes no effort to hide her stares. Surely, the idea is that she must look.  Must study her in order to draw her. But when Bernie’s eyes settle so obviously on Serena’s breasts, when she hasn’t even opened her sketchbook yet, Serena’s breathing quickens and her chest heaves for a reason other than nerves.

She is reminded exactly why she wanted this. Because she very much suspected Bernie wanted it too. And when Bernie picks up her pencil and starts to draw, Serena watches Bernie’s eyes darken in desire she tries to tamp down, but never can.

Bernie sketches out an outline first with soft, measured strokes of her pencil – far more slowly than she normally would. There is a tremor in her hand and she must take care to keep her pencil steady. Bernie can feel Serena’s eyes fixed on her the entire time.

Bernie draws Serena’s hair. Imagines entangling one hand through the soft curls, whilst using her other hand to cup Serena’s face. She imagines brushing her thumb over Serena’s slightly parted lips. Imagines taking Serena’s lower lip within her own, sucking on it. Imagines parting Serena’s lips further with her tongue and exploring her mouth. She imagines trailing her kisses across the curve of Serena’s jawline, from the dimple in her chin to her ear, before tracing the lobe with her tongue.

She imagines making her way back down to Serena’s pulse point. Grazing her teeth over the soft skin, before latching her lips there and sucking hard. She imagines both of them knowing it will leave a mark. She can feel Serena’s hands fist in her hair, trying to guide Bernie’s head down. Bernie imagines sweeping her tongue along Serena’s collarbone. Scattering kisses down the smooth skin of the valley between Serena’s breasts, only pressing her mouth, briefly to the top of one, before withdrawing her head to look at Serena underneath her. Pupils blown-wide with desire and black as night. Swollen lips wet from where her tongue has just darted out to lick them.

Bernie’s imagines brushing her thumbs over Serena’s nipples, feeling them pebble underneath her touch. She imagines dipping her head to take one of the buds within her mouth. She imagines swirling her tongue around one nipple whilst rolling the other between her thumb and forefinger, drawing out a long, low moan from Serena.

Bernie imagines dragging her lips down Serena’s stomach, but stopping short of her sex. She imagines gripping hips that cant upward the second she lets them go. She imagines skating her hands over Serena’s thighs, down her calves, trailing her fingers right down to the back of her ankles, before repeating the journey back up to her centre.

Bernie imagines scraping her nails lightly against the skin of Serena’s thighs. Imagines replacing her fingers with her lips. Kissing and teasing at the skin of her inner thighs with lips and tongue and teeth, always drifting up to her sex but never quite reaching it. Until she dips her head so that her lips are nearly where Serena wants them. She imagines Serena’s groans at the feel of Bernie’s breathes on her sex. The vibrations as Bernie chuckles at the other woman pleads Bernie’s name.

Bernie imagines running a finger though the slick folds of her sex, marvelling at the wetness there and yearning to taste it, but not doing so, not yet. She imagines slipping a finger into Serena’s heat. She imagines joining it with another finger shortly after. Imagines drawing them out, pushing them back in rhythmically. She imagines Serena’s hips rising to meet her thrusts. From between Serena's thighs, Bernie imagines looking up at Serena, her own desire filled eyes locking with eyes desperate with want. She imagines watching Serena’s eyes flutter shut as Bernie curls her fingers inside her.

She can feel that she is close.

She imagines Serena’s whimper after Bernie removes her fingers, her body arching with the need to be filled up once more.

Bernie imagines pressing her lips to Serena’s sex, sweeping her tongue up, through her wetness, before dipping inside of her. Tasting her sweetness. Drinking her up.

She imagines flicking over Serena’s clit with her tongue. Sliding three fingers inside of her and making her cry out at the delicious stretch as Bernie builds her higher and higher. She imagines feeling her clench and spasm around her fingers. Feels her come on her tongue, Bernie’s name on her lips.

Bernie shifts uncomfortably in her seat. The bite of her teeth on her lower lip has nothing to do with concentration as she draws. For a while there’s nothing but the soft scrape of pencil on paper or the occasional crackling of the fire in the grate, until she hears Serena draw a deep breath. That’s all it takes to claim Bernie’s attention and her eyes flicker up.

"How do women . . ." 

Serena pauses, but all hesitancy in her voice vanishes after she takes another breath. Her voice is direct and low, lower than Bernie’s ever heard it. “How does one woman take another to bed?”

Bernie nearly drops her pencil.

Yes, her mind checks, she did just hear that correctly and yes, from the way Serena is looks at her, penetrating and deep, with a glistening in her eye that wasn’t there before, it was a question for Bernie.

Serena knows what Bernie was just thinking. Was thinking it herself.

A spark shoots up Bernie's spine. Her skin flushes. Not just her face and chest. Every inch of her skin feels aflame. The room is unbearably hot. She wants, no, needs to tear her eyes away from the woman in front of her, but she’s entrapped within the intensity of Serena’s gaze.

_How does one woman take another to bed?_

Of course, Serena's long ago worked Bernie out. Maybe it's an acknowledgement of Bernie’s queer desires. Maybe it's an open acceptance of them. Maybe it's more.

Serena’s gaze is burning into Bernie’s skin and Bernie, heart thudding, feels as naked as her. Bernie clutches her pencil within a clammy fist. The tip presses against her knee, the end against the palm of her hand. It’s a wonder it doesn’t snap in two.

“I think,” Bernie’s voice is far steadier and bolder than she feels, “that, perhaps, you’ve already worked it out."

This time it is Serena’s turn to feel like her skin is ablaze and her gaze slips to the floor.

Bernie switches her pencil to her left hand. She rubs the sweat from her right hand on her thigh, before switching the pencil back. The drawing is nearly done. She shades in the jewel at Serena's neck. Serena showed her the diamond shortly after inviting her into her cabin. She retrieved it from the safe where Edward had put it. Asked Bernie to draw her it. In only the diamond. 

Bernie shades in the diamond until it looks af it is sparkling, before pressing the edge of the tip of her pencil into the paper, hard. She fills in Serena’s pupils with the utmost precision, before swiping the slightest shadow beneath the curve of her left breast. Bernie ghosts the pencil across the paper and down her body. She shades in the darkness at the apex of her thighs, alternating the pressure she applies throughout.

How does one woman take another to bed? Bernie thinks as she finishes mapping out Serena’s body. Well, it’s rather like this. Except your mouth kisses every inch that her hands have only, just now, been able to revere from a distance.

“There,” Bernie remarks, “finished.”

“I want to see it.” Serena rises and wraps the dark blue silk of the dressing gown she discarded, minutes ago? Hours ago? It feels like hours, but it can’t be. Serena walks over to Bernie without any further preamble. As if this is as natural as anything to her. Familiar, even. But her voice, the quiver of anticipation that was beneath her demand, betrayed her and any nonchalance she might hope to present. Standing behind Bernie, she leans in to look over her shoulder and examine the drawing. Bernie leans back ever so slightly, against Serena, into her.

Bernie doesn’t know what’s worse, waiting for Serena’s critique of her work or waiting and knowing that her own eyes and hands have – albeit on paper – mere moments ago, tracked the curves Serena’s thin gown now conceals. Bernie reckons Serena is thinking that too as she places her hand on Bernie’s shoulder and leans in further.

“Well,” Bernie breathes out. “What do you think?”

“It’s quite a thing,” Serena murmurs against the skin of Bernie’s neck.

"A thing? Any elaboration on that? On the thing?"

Nervously, Bernie attempts a bit of humour. The tiny tremor that was in her hand has multiplied in power and now ripples through her whole body. She still doesn’t know what Serena thinks of the drawing, and even when she does, whether Serena’s thoughts are good or bad, Bernie knows that the tremors aren’t going anywhere.

Never before has she wanted to know so much what someone thinks of her work. _Any elaboration on that?_

Fingertips come to rest on her chin and gently tilt her head to one side. Serena leans down, leans in closer. How can there be any more _closer_ to move into, Bernie doesn't know, but there is. So much more.

“Will this do?” Serena asks and closes the space between their lips.

And suddenly, Bernie can’t get close enough.


	4. Chapter 4

Serena moves around to the front of the chair. “So? Ms Wolfe? Will it do?”

Bernie replies by springing to her feet and kissing her fiercely, one hand entangling in Serena’s hair, the other splaying on her back, pulling her closer to Bernie. Serena slips her tongue into Bernie’s mouth, eliciting a small moan from the other woman. Bernie hands slide down Serena’s back, moulding against her hips, before gripping her ass. Serena’s hands reach for the buttons of Bernie’s shirt.

“Serena?”

Both women freeze at the sound of Edward’s voice outside the door. “Serena, are you in there?”

Serena clears her throat. “Edward?”

“Who else is it going to be, woman? Are you coming to lunch?"

"No. I - I don't feel up to it. I couldn't sleep last night," Serena improvises. "I think I might go back to bed."

"People are starting to wonder where you are. They're starting to talk."

"I hardly think I'm the only one to be taken with seasickness," Serena tells him. "There's nothing to talk about."

"Well . . . then, I'll see you tonight." They hear footsteps plod away. Two pairs of footsteps. They hear Edward turn to his friend next to him. "People are starting to wonder whether I have a bloody wife at all."

Bernie's hands are still around Serena's waist. Her front still pressed to Serena's. Serena feels Bernie's laughs on her skin.

"Want to," Bernie asks her, giggling, "catch up on sleep with me?"

Serena fixes her hand firmly on Bernie's mouth, head still turned to the door, eyes still locked on the door handle. “ _Shush_!”

“It’s fine. He’s gone,” Berne tries to mumble against Serena’s hand.

Serena waits a moment, waits far longer than Bernie deems necessary, before slowly drawing her eyes from the door and her hand from Bernie’s face. She steps back and exhales deeply.

“You’re shaking,” Bernie exclaims, brow creasing in concern.

“It is any surprise? My husband nearly found me in bed with another woman."

“Ah, but . . .” Bernie’s whisper is gossamer-soft. Gentle and teasing at the same time. “We weren’t in bed.” She takes Serena’s hands within both of hers. With her thumbs, Bernie traces small, comforting circles on Serena’s skin.

“Have you got a cigarette?” Serena asks, panic flooding through her now not just because of Edward’s near-intrusion, but because of the gravity of what she just said. _In bed with another woman._ That’s what she was planning, wasn’t it? And that’s what she wanted to do. What she still wants to do. And the fear, the thud of her heart, isn’t because of the _woman_ part. It’s because she never expected to want anything like this again. To feel the hunger, the thrill and the terror, of wanting someone. To feel alive, after all this time.

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Bernie quirks an eyebrow.

“You assumed.”

Bernie feels in her pocket. “Last one,” she says, pressing a cigarette in Serena’s hand. She reaches back in her pocket for a matchbox, strikes a match and raises it up. Serena, cigarette held to her mouth, leans in and lights the cigarette. Takes a long drag.

“Better?”

“Almost." Serena runs a hand through her hair. “In the next room, there’s a door. It leads out on to the corridor. Will you check if it’s locked?”

“Sure.” Bernie steps into the adjoining room. Finds the door locked - as she guessed it was.

When she returns, Bernie sees the diamond glittering on top a chest of drawers. Serena has taken it off. She stands in front of the fireplace with her back to her, smoking. Bernie stands behind her and slides her arms around Serena’s waist, over the sash of her dressing gown. She looks over Serena’s shoulder, following Serena’s line of sight, to the fire blazing in the grate in front of them. The heat is scorching.

“Aren’t you warm?” She asks, lips brushing over the spot just behind Serena’s ear.

“A bit.” Serena’s lowers the cigarette from her lips. Her head lolls back against Bernie’s shoulder as Bernie’s hands glide up to palm Serena’s breasts through the thin material of her dressing gown. Bernie begins to pepper kisses along the curve of her neck. Her hands skate down Serena’s torso to untie the sash of the gown. She loosens the knot, but doesn’t part the front of the robe. She presses her lips firmer against the place where Serena's neck meets her shoulder, but the collar of the gown stops her from trailing down further. Bernie lifts her hand and peels back the fabric from Serena's shoulder. 

It happens in an instant.

Before Serena can realise what's wrong Bernie steps back. Her hands slip away from Serena's body.

As Serena turns around to face Bernie, she pulls the dressing gown tight around, so it covers her body once more. She knots the sash. She is prepared for questions, but not for the flicker of disgust she sees in Bernie's eyes.

“How dare he.” Bernie’s voice is venomous.

“What?”

“He’ll be at lunch now, won't he?"

“Who?”

“Edward?”

Bernie makes for the door. Serena darts after her. She puts her body between Bernie and the door. She presses her back against the door, stopping Bernie in her tracks. She has never before seen the fire in Bernie's eyes that she sees now.

“It’s just from the other night,” through rushed breathes, she explains the bruise at the top of her back, “when we fell to the floor.”

“You don’t have to protect him.”

“ _I’m not._ There was a bolt in one of the planks. I hit my shoulder on it.”

“And the other marks? They look - "

“Edward has nothing do with them.”

“I don’t believe you. This is why you were so terrified when he was at the door.”

“I was scared of getting caught. I told you.”

“Scared of what he'd do?"

“Bernie, just stop. You don't have a clue."

“Let me past, Serena," Bernie orders, grabbing at the door handle.

"No."

"Yes."

"Why won't you listen to me!"

"Because if it wasn't Edward, then who?"

“My mother. Okay, my mother!” Serena gives up her defence of the door. Moves to sink down on the chaise where she modelled for Bernie what seems a lifetime ago. She rests her head in her hands.

"Your mother?" Bernie lingers at the door, watches Serena sigh deeply, prepare herself. 

“My mother was old and she was sick. She forgot things. Muddled memories. She got confused. She got  . . . well . . ."

"God, Serena."

"Some days," Serena murmurs, recalling the memories she thought she'd never revisit again, "some days, she thought she was still a girl of eighteen, still in her first season. Excited for her first debutante ball. Thinking she'd find a moneyed bachelor. If you told her, that she'd marry a doctor instead, she wouldn't have believed you. Some days she didn't remember she married my father. Some days, she didn’t even remember she had a daughter." Serena remembers the days when her mother thought she was a maid or a nurse, come to tend her. 

"She lost her memories, Bernie, and there was nothing we could do. I didn’t want to call for a physician. I was frightened they would put her in an institution. So, I cared for her  Sometimes she got angry, but it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t mad. There were days where she was lucid, like her old self, like nothing had happened. Her wits were as sharp as anything. But those days, towards the end, become less and less frequent. She would catch fevers, and she would recover, but with each one she would grow weaker and weaker. One day, I went into her room and she wasn’t there. It was the middle of winter. There was snow on the ground, and I found her barefoot, outside, without a coat. She wouldn’t come back inside. She died the three days after."

“How long was she . . . how long did you look after her?”

“Two years. Nearly.”

“It must have been extraordinarily difficult for you. Did Edward know . . . how she was?"

“Did he know everything? How ill she truly was. No. If he did, he would have carted her off to an institution himself. I was scared any maid we hired probably would have too.”

“So, you cared for her all by yourself?”

“She was my mother. Any other daughter would have done the same.”

“I’m so sorry, Serena.”

Serena wants to say, don’t be, it’s a relief she’s gone, but the moment she thinks it she is overwhelmed with guilt. How cruel a daughter is she to think that? How monstrous a person? Not even a person, for surely no human should think that.

So, she doesn’t say it.

“She died a month ago,” she tells Bernie, voice empty and devoid of any emotion. “It feels like an age.”

-

She knew something was wrong the second she woke up in a cold and dark room. It was just shy of dawn when she clambered out of bed and went to her mother’s room. Found her bed empty. She searched the house frantically. She saw her mother’s coat hanging up.

Serena threw on her own coat and laced up her boots. Ran outside. To the graveyard five streets away. Her mother had wandered there before, but always in daylight. She was there now.

Serena found her standing in her night dress in the middle of snow-covered grave stones, shivering.

“Mother!”

Adrienne looked up, eyes wide and lost. “I can’t find your father.”

“Oh, mother. Look at you,” Serena reached out a hand. “Let me take you home. We can visit father tomorrow.” She unbuttoned her coat, but Adrienne batted her hand away when she tried to wrap it around her.

“Why won’t you take me? Ellie would.”

“We can come tomorrow.”

“Ellie used to love taking the flowers when she was a little girl. Why can’t she take me?”

“Because I am," Serena rubbed her mother's bare arm, trying to warm up her cold skin. "I will."

Adrienne jumped away from Serena's toucb. 

“I don’t want you to take me. I want her to,” she spat. “Where is she? What have you done with her?” Adrienne narrowed her eyes at her daughter. “You never liked me spending time with her. Never liked how close we were. You were jealous.”

“That’s ridiculous and you know it.”

“Then where is she?”

Her mother lunged at her. Serena jumped out the way just in time to miss the blow, but she stumbled over a collection of stones - a makeshift memorial for someone whose family couldn’t afford a proper stone - lost her balance. Tumbled to the ground. Snow stung her face and hands. She clawed at it, trying to find purchase somewhere so she could press her hands on solid ground and lift herself up. Her fingers, pink with cold – in her haste to leave the house, she forgot her gloves – scraped over stones, hidden under the snow. A bead of blood bubbled from her ring finger and seeped into the white of the snow. Serena lifted herself up. Climbed to her feet.

She thought of the dream she had last night, of Elinor running away from her, one hand outreached for Serena to grasp, but one Serena never managed to. Serena strode toward her mother.

“She’s in here," she yelled. "Elinor’s dead, mother. She’s dead!”

Serena expected the slap so much, she felt the burn on her cheek. The rawness of her skin when she felt her cheek was just from the bitter January wind.

Adrienne turned away. Thin trails of blood, sunk into the snow, after her footsteps. The stones had cut her bare feet. She walked on, without a word, abandoning Serena. Serena let her. She didn't know where her mother was heading - even if she headed for the house, her mother might lose her way. Serena knew she should follow her. See her home safe. But she didn't.

She picked up her coat from where she dropped it on the ground. Shook snow off it. Wrapped it around her body and buttoned it up. Serena turned in the opposite direction from her mother, trudged through the snow, trudged past the graves, stopped at Elinor's. She sunk to her knees. Lay down on the ground. Murmured words to her daughter. Apologies.

She should have been there. Not just on that day, but for the whole of Elinor's childhood. She should have never left the house. Never left her daughter's side. It was only twice a week, but she should have never volunteered in the rehabilitation home for fallen women. 

“While you were with your whores, our daughter died alone.” Edward raged at her, when Serena returned home to find her daughter’s form limp in bed and the priest just leaving the house.

 _A sudden fever,_ the doctor told her later. _In her last moments, she . . . she wouldn’t have been herself. It would have been difficult for a woman to watch, let alone a mother._

Serena remembered his words, clear as day in her head, but she couldn’t recall her daughter’s. Her last words or the last worda Serena had spoken to her. She'd tried so hard to recall them, but she never could.

At the funeral, she promised her daughter she would never forget her. She promised it now, curling up her body, as dawn came, as black night shifted to a grey morning clogged with fog. Wet, thin snow fluttered down from the clouded-over sky. Landed on her cheek, but she didn’t feel it.

In the morning, two men found her. Recognised her and took her home. She had caught the cold, like her mother. She slept for half the day and woke up at dusk, but her mother didn’t. She slept for three days, and on the third Serena rested her head on her mother’s chest. Felt no movement beneath.

They buried her next to Serena’s father, in the family plot.

They buried her next to Elinor.

Edward sold the house and brought them tickets on the ship.

-

Serena rubs her forehead, trying to erase the memories in her mind. If they are pencil sketches, she has no wish to paint them in with words by speaking any further of her mother to Bernie. Of telling her anything more about that horrendous night.

“It’s why we left England,” she tells Bernie, “too many memories.”

Serena rises to her feet and moves to a cabinet in the corner of the room. Searches within it.

“I truly can’t imagine how terrible – " Bernie begins, but Serena cuts her off.

“Then don’t,” she says and with a flourish presents a bottle of wine to Bernie.

“Edward’s,” she explains, eyes glinting. “His drinking isn’t good for him, or the reputation he so desperately wants to uphold, so really, as his dutiful wife, I’m only looking out for him.” Serena rummages around for glasses, but can’t find any. She shrugs her shoulders. Turns around to Bernie. Arches an eyebrow.  “How about a change of scenery, Ms Wolfe?”

“We're on a ship. There’s not much scenery but sea.”

“Don’t worry,” Serena stalks over to Bernie, bottle clutched in hand. “I’m a resourceful woman. Now,” she smirks, “back to this business of seducing you.”

“I thought I was seducing you.”

“In your dreams.” She leans in close to Bernie, so they are face to face. Bernie can feel Serena’s warm breath on her lips as she instructs her. 

“I’m going to put back on my dress and then – ”

“I’m not quite sure that’s how it works,” Bernie quips.

Serena places one finger lightly against Bernie’s lips. This time it is all she needs to keep her quiet.

“ _Shush_.” Her eyes glisten. She pulls on her lower lip with her teeth, releases it slowly. “Want to steal a car?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so three updates in three days. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to stop for the time being. Exams call. But I have planned all the way to the end. 
> 
> Well, I've planned two endings. I'm still deciding how exactly it's all going down (pun not intended).
> 
> The more reviews I get the more I'll inflate the lifejackets.
> 
> JUST KIDDING.


	5. Chapter 5

There is nothing but the sound of their breathing. Short, ragged gulps of air steadying into longer, calmer intakes. Serena has her hand on Bernie’s heart. She feels the rhythm of her heartbeat steady beneath her fingertips. She has her head in the crook of Bernie’s neck. Her eyes closed. She should move, she knows. Slide off Bernie’s body and sit up, but she can’t quite bear the separation – not yet. Can’t quite bear losing the heat of Bernie’s skin from underneath her. Can’t bear to untangle their limbs when her own feel so languid and heavy. 

Such a delicious tiredness floods through her body and all she wants to do is stay here, with Bernie, and succumb to it. Two more minutes, she promises herself. Then she will rise. Then she will dress. She will tame the unruly locks of her hair; locks Bernie had buried her hands in and curled her fingers through moments ago. She will wind it up, as best she can, into some shape of propriety. Just the thought of untangling the knots makes Serena inwardly wince.

She doesn’t want to dress. She doesn’t want to do anything, but stay here, naked, wrapped up in Bernie’s body, the two of them wrapped up within the bubble of warmth they have created, within the air that is heavy with the scent of them – her scent, Bernie’s scent, intermingling together. Indistinguishable.

Two more minutes, she promises herself. But she has no wristwatch. No proper way to tell the time.

She measures it by Bernie’s heartbeats – once rapid, now steady. She measures it by the feeling of her skin cooling, the warmth between them gradually dissipating.

Shock slowly seeps over her at what’s she done. The thrill of it runs up her spine, causes her to smile against Bernie’s skin.

They had left the cabin, walking side by side, bodies just brushing. Footsteps a steady pace, as if they were merely journeying to luncheon. But there was a silence between them, ripe with promise and quivering with excitement. Serena lead Bernie down corridor after corridor, replying to each of her curious looks, with tight-lipped smiles.

They reached an area of the ship out of bounds for passengers. Kept on walking. Until Serena spotted a crew member. Before he could spot them, she grabbed Bernie’s hands and tightened her other hand around the bottle of wine she had stolen from Edward's collection.

They ended running amid the heat and steam and ruckus of the engine room. The clanging of machinery, the shouting of men, almost deafening. They had found a motor, black and gleaming, and claimed it as their own.

Bernie had hopped into the front seat. Imitated the smooth, refined vowels of Serena’s accent. “So, Madam, where would you like to go?”

Serena had walked around the car, sat in the seat next to Bernie.

“Haven’t a clue? You?” Serena slumped back in the seat and brought the bottle of wine to her mouth. Bernie's louds laughs filled the car at the sight of her drinking straight from the bottle.

“What?” Serena shrugged her shoulders. “One need do what one must. There were no glasses.”

She passed Bernie the bottle, but Bernie gave a shake of her head.

“Not thirsty?”

Bernie’s eyes fixed on Serena’s lips, dark and glistening from the wine. She took the bottle from Serena’s hand but opened the car door and set it down outside on the floor.

“What are you doing? That’s bloody good – “

Bernie silenced Serena’s protests with a hard, bruising kiss. She tasted the wine on her lips, sweet and sharp. It was good, she thought. But she couldn’t tell whether that was the taste of the wine or of Serena.

When Serena pushed her jacket off her shoulders, Bernie broke away.

“You sure about this?”

Serena stepped out the car, shut the door and slipped into the backseat of the car.

Bernie turned to Serena. “I mean, it’s your first time with a woman and – “

Serena tutted. Reached forward and encircled her arms around Bernie’s neck. “Again, Ms Wolfe, with your assumptions.”

With that she pulled Bernie into the back of the car.

 _How does one woman take another to bed?_ Serena’s hands were on her, stripping her deftly of clothes, her mouth was hot and determined on Bernie’s skin. _How does one woman take another to bed?_ Of course, Bernie realised, Serena had been no blushing innocent. Of course, she had asked it for a purpose. To make Bernie squirm. To make her flush with heat. To make it pool between her thighs.

_How does one woman take another to bed?_

Of course, Serena had bloody known, but, then again, Bernie thought – her hand hovering just above where Serena needed, where she ached – Serena couldn’t know anything.

There must still be a few things Bernie could teach her.

-

Bernie feels the contentment that had swept over her body, after they trembled, shuddered, bodies slick with sweat, chests heaving – after she felt Serena come around her, after Bernie came under her – she feels the contentment changing into something else, a thirst that won’t be quenched by any wine.

When Serena lifts her head so that she can look Bernie in the eye, when she mumbles to her that they should dress, Bernie’s hands do not slide from Serena’s back.

“I want you,” Bernie breathes into the small space between their lips.

“Again?” Serena isn’t sure her body physically has enough strength.

“Tonight,” Bernie says, “I want you in a bed. I want you in ways I couldn’t have you here.”

Serena feels herself blush. She smiles. “Okay.”

-

They are sitting on a bench at the stern of the ship: the place they first met. Evening is quickly falling, the sky darkening, the air growing colder. Serena has no overcoat. Her arms are bare. But she doesn’t want to go inside, not yet. In the time between feeling Bernie Wolfe’s body tremble against her own in the back of a motor car and now, Serena has done a lot of thinking, and she has made up her mind. 

“What did your family think when you left Marcus?” Serena asks Bernie.

“I didn’t have any.”

“No-one?”

“No-one to disappoint, anyway.” Bernie shrugs. Turns to face Serena, puzzled at where her questions have suddenly come from. Even though she can feel Bernie’s eyes on her, Serena doesn’t raise her own eyes from her lap. She plays with a loose thread on the skirt of her dress. Twirls it around her little finger. Takes a deep breath.

“I’m going to leave Edward.”

“Where will you go?” Bernie’s voice is soft, gentle.

“I have a nephew,” Serena explains. “I didn’t know he existed until recently. I had a sister, that I didn’t know about either. After my mother died, I sorted out her things. I found letters. Years old. To a man that wasn’t my father.”

“A previous husband?”

“A previous lover. A coward, from what I read. Ran away at the first sight of trouble. There was a child. My sister.”

“Your mother had to give her up?”

“Left the child at the doorstep of a nunnery. She couldn’t do anything else. I don’t think her parents knew. I mean, how could she have told them? So, she did it in secret. All these years . . . she’d kept it a secret.”

Bernie turns silent. It becomes a struggle to breathe. A lump, dry and dusty as coal, sticks in her throat. Her eyes flutter down to her own lap. She squeezes them shut in an effort to block out unwelcome memories. She knows Serena will begin to wonder what’s wrong if she doesn’t say anything soon.

“You said you had a sister?”

“After I found the letters, I made inquiries. I wanted to find this family I never knew. All I found out, however, was that it was smaller than I thought. My sister died in the late eighties. Consumption.”

“God.”

“So soon after my mother, it was hard. I felt like I’d lost two people instead of one.”

“You had.”

“Edward didn’t see it like that,” Serena says, “he thought I was stupid to mourn someone I had never knew. He called a Doctor to diagnose me with melancholia. When the Doctor did, Edward forbade me to search anymore for my mother’s illicit family. By then, to be honest, I didn’t have the strength for it. I knew my sister had a son, Jason. I knew he was alive. And I wanted to find him I did, but I . . . I gave up . . .”

“You were grieving.” Bernie says, but she struggles to concentrate on Serena’s words, on Serena telling her of her family, of her sister’s death. Bernie feels terrible, but her own thoughts are caught up in a whirlwind of memories. Her words, _you were grieving,_ arehalf directed to Serena, half directed to her past self. 

“Yes, but I’d wanted so much to find my sister. I had no one left. No family but Edward. And I couldn’t help thinking of Jason. No father. No mother. What if he had no-one too? But,” Serena smiles, turning to Bernie. “I’m going to search for him. I’m going to find him.”

“You should.”

Serena places one hand over Bernie’s. Her eyes are wide and hopeful and earnest. Her voice tremulous.

“Bernie . . . come with me.”

That request is enough, for the moment, for Bernie to tamp down the unwanted memories, and focus entirely on Serena. 

“You want me to help you find him?”

“When we dock, I want to get off this ship with you.”

“And then what?” Bernie’s tone is harder than Serena anticipated, almost one of scorn, but it soon softens into one of self-deprecation. “I have nothing, Serena. Nothing to offer you.”

“I don’t care,” Serena brings Bernie’s hand to her lips. Presses a fleeting, gentle kiss to her skin. “I want _you_.”

Bernie pulls her hand back. Springs to her feet.

“I can't. I can't do this."

-

Edward shouts for Serena. According to several sources, his wife has not done as she has been told. She has been galivanting, careless as anything, with that man again. Edward’s friend, John, saw her with him just this morning.

And Edward has had enough.

He storms into their cabin, John at his heels. Edward finds every room empty. Finds the safe open, with no diamond inside of it. He clenches his fist. Sweeps the room with his eyes for any sign of where Serena might be. He finds a dark blue robe – Serena’s – on the chaise. He seizes it. The diamond tumbles out its folds, onto the floor. Edward rushes to scoop it up within his fingers. Rage boils within him.

“That woman,” he blazes to John. “Does she have any grasp of the fortune this jewel is worth?”

As Edward goes to place the diamond within the safe, he spots something else that had fallen on the floor. A bow-tie.

He picks that up too. Crunches the fabric within his fingers.

-

Bernie stares out to the ocean, her back to Serena. She blinks back tears, unaware that Serena is doing the same.

“You just want to leave this . . . us, behind on the ship, when we reach America?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

There’s a reason I started running, Bernie wants to tell Serena. That’s a reason she left Marcus, and it wasn’t just arguments over the clinic. There’s a reason she recognised Serena’s depression. Her want not to go on. Her conviction that she didn’t _deserve_ to go on.

Didn’t deserve to live.

Bernie, after years of self-hatred and regret and torment, managed to push past that point of despair. But the feelings, they haven’t completely disappeared. They never will. They are etched on her like the stretchmarks on her stomach. The stretchmarks she would trace her fingers over, murmuring words to someone who wasn’t there to listen. She cried the day she saw that the stretchmarks had faded almost to invisibility. A cruel twist of her genetic make-up. Her own body trying to cover up the past, when she didn’t want it to. But Bernie, every then and now, still runs her fingertips over her stomach. She knows exactly where the marks were. She knows they’re still there, and will be, forever.

“Bernie?” Serena’s voice drags her out of her reverie. “Bernie, look at me.”

Bernie twists around on foot. Sees tears streaming down Serena’s face. She hates herself for causing them, and she hates herself for what she needs to ask next.

“This morning, when I went to lock that door, I saw a photo. Of a girl. She looked like you.”

“What are you on about?”

“The photo in your bedroom. The girl with dark hair and a cleft in her chin. Who is she?”

“My mother.”

“Why don’t you have one of her when she was older?”

 _I really don’t see why it’s any of your business,_ Serena wants to lash out. She’s confused as to why Bernie’s brought all this up, until she isn’t. Until she realises Bernie might have guessed. Lashing out in anger, revealing the nerve Bernie’s questions have scraped over, would only raise Bernie’s suspicion more.

And Serena isn’t ready to go there. She thinks, as ridiculous as that sounds within the short time she’s known Bernie, that she’s fallen in love with this woman, but she isn’t ready, not yet, to talk about Elinor to Bernie. To share the memories of her daughter with anyone else. They’re the only thing she has left of Elinor. The only thing she shares with her daughter.

She even hates the fact that Bernie’s saw the photograph of Elinor, she realises.

So, she lies.

“I don’t have another photograph of my mother because, Bernie, I simply don’t own one. I wish I did.” She knows it will make Bernie feel guilty. She knows it will stop her questions.

What she doesn’t know is that it also stops Bernie telling Serena what she was going to tell her. It makes Bernie mentally slam the door on her past. A past she though Serena might understand, after her talk of volunteering at rehabilitation homes for fallen women, after the sympathy with which she talked of her mother and the child she couldn't keep.

But Bernie can no longer find the words she thought she could.

Instead, she works on finding the ones she needs to say right now, the words to stitch up the wound she has opened between her and Serena. Tears still glisten on Serena’s cheeks. Bernie walks back to the bench, kneels in front of Serena and takes her hands.

“I’m scared,” Bernie admits, in a whisper.

“Me too. Contrary to what you might think,” Serena wipes back a tear, managing a weak chuckle, “I’ve never run off with a woman before.”

“Well, then, I better make it worth your while.”

“You better.”

Bernie reaches up. Kisses Serena briefly on the lips. Pushes her fingers through Serena’s hair and tilts her head down so Bernie can kiss the curve of her cheekbones, wet by tears.

“We could go to Paris,” Serena suggests.

“The city of sin,” Bernie smirks.

“I could show you the places I used to go with my mother, and you could show me the places you lived in.”

“All of Paris’s hidden secrets?”

“Every last one.”

“Okay,” Bernie agrees. “I’d like that.” She rises to her feet. Offers a hand to pull Serena up, as if asking her for a dance.

When they get off the ship, a dance in Paris, exploring its sights and secrets.

Tonight, another certain kind of dance.

“Shall we go inside? I believe,” Bernie says, inviting herself back to Serena’s cabin with a mischievous grin, “you made me a promise.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, about tonight.”

“You can have me, Ms Wolfe,” Serena smirks devilishly, “when you catch me.” With that, she runs off, leaving Bernie to follow in her wake.

Bernie is faster than her, and soon catches her. Pins her against the wall of a corridor. Pressing their bodies together, but not their lips. Just whispering against Serena’s skin what she wants to do to her.

Serena swiftly turns them around. Has Bernie against the wall. Kisses her hard, and kisses her good. Kisses her breathless.

They don’t hear the shudder of the ship. The halt of the engines, the pause of silence or the frantic whirl of propellers as the crew try to swerve the ship clear away from the iceberg, but fail.

Serena kisses Bernie until all Bernie can hear is Serena’s moans and all she can taste is Serena’s lips and all she can feel is her tongue, sliding inside and around her mouth.

Bernie’s still stood against the wall, legs a tad unsteady, breath extremely so, when Serena darts off again, running away from Bernie.

 _Just wait until I catch her,_ Bernie thinks. Just wait until she can pin Serena against a bed instead of a wall, until she can get her whimpering and arching and writhing. And begging.

She will have her payback.

She watches Serena slip through the door to her cabin, disappear from Bernie’s line of sight. Bernie increases her pace. Her smile widens but the moment she enters the room it drops, completely, from her lips.

Serena’s smile is gone too. She is standing in the middle of the room opposite Edward. She watches his lips curl, his jaw set, his eyes grow livid when Bernie comes up behind Serena.

“Ah, finally,” Edward waves an arm at his wife. “She’s alive, after all.”

“Edward, I – “

“Oh, don’t tell me, Serena. You’ve felt so ill recently, and he – “ Edward points a finger at Bernie, laughing. “ _He_ just so happens to be a doctor. He’s merely treating you. Seeing to your needs.”

“Edward, I think we should – “

“No, _I_ think I should get back what’s rightfully mine.” Edward cocks his head for his friend John to step forward.

“ _Rightfully yours_?” Serena shouts. Surely, he can’t mean her. He better bloody not.

“Search him.” Edward orders. John seizes Bernie roughly.

“What? What on earth?” Serena’s mouth falls open when John pulls the diamond from Bernie’s pocket. Holds it up.  

“Or maybe he’s not a doctor,” Edward sneers, taking the jewel from John and slipping it in his coat pocket. “Maybe he’s just a common thief.”

“No, Serena, I didn’t – I wouldn’t.” Bernie protests, but Serena is too speechless with shock to answer her. 

“Get him out my sight,” Edward yells. John seizes Bernie once again, drags her out the room.

“And you,” Edwars stabs a finger in Serena’s direction, “don’t you dare think of following him!”

Edward and Serena are left alone in the room together. Serena feels her eyes with burn with tears, but she would rather die than let them spill in front of Edward. She sinks down in a chair, confusion and hurt washing over her. She waits for Edward’s fury.

She gets laughter.

“Look at you,” Edward taunts. “You thought he wanted you. He only wanted the jewel.”

“Well,” Serena voice is lifeless as she rests her chin in her hand and stares off into the distance, “now you have it back. Mystery solved.”

“I know where you’ve been, Serena,” Edward levels.

Serena wants to say _so what?_ She doesn’t have the energy to deal with Edward’s righteous anger. Her mind’s awash with thoughts of Bernie, of Bernie drawing her, kissing her, trembling in her arms, kneeling at her feet, agreeing to begin a new life with her. Other images cloud over those. Bernie secretly laughing behind her back. At Serena, foolishly, wantonly throwing herself in Bernie’s arms, desperate for affection – and Bernie desperate for the jewel.

“You foolish woman,” Edward lights a cigarette. Leans back against the fireplace. “You know, I had people follow you.”

Serena’s eyes snap up to Edward’s. “You spied on me?”

If all those memories of her and Bernie, of the delicate and beautiful thing between them, had just become tarnished by Bernie’s betrayal, now they become irreparably desecrated.

“I had good enough reason why. You’ve been behaving like a common whore.”

Serena jumps to her feet. “You take a new mistress every other week. Why is it so different from what you do? Why one rule for you and one for me?”

Realisation dawns. Serena raises her hand to her mouth. “O my God, you know, don’t you?”

“Yes, I fucking know,” Edward spits. “I know what _that_ woman is and I know my own wife is cavorting with an invert. Let’s pray the whole damn ship doesn’t know too.”

“This is why –”

“She’s unnatural, Serena. You’re unnatural. Don’t tell me you’re one of them too?”

“Why,” Serena yells, nearing Edward, “haven’t your spies found that out?”

“Good God. If this gets heard of . . .”

“I know,” Serena smiles a twisted smile, her eyes glinting. She drawls the words out. “Just _imagine_ the scandal. _Serena Campbell. Lesbian.”_

Edward marches up to her. Towers over her. “I always knew you were selfish, but you really don’t care do you? You’ll happily drag this family to the ground.”

“What family, Edward? There is no family. Our daughter is dead. Our marriage is _dead_.”

“I’ll never let you have a divorce.”

“I don’t want one.”

“Then, what do you want?” Serena looks past him, over his shoulder to the door. Edward grabs her chin and forces Serena to look up at him. “Tell me!”

“I want _her_.”

Edward digs his fingers into Serena’s skin. Serena eyes flicker to the side, to where Edward holds out his cigarette, to the end that glows red.

A man bursts through the door. Edward drops his hand, turning to watch the man dart to the wardrobe and pull the lifebelts from the top. He thrusts two into Edward’s arms.

“Please, Sir, Madan,” the crew member pants, “put on your lifebelts and make you way to the top deck.”

“What in hell is going on?” Edward demands.

“Nothing to be concerned about, Sir. Just a precaution.” He leaves the room as quick as he entered, off to warn another cabin. As he does, he advises: “It’s cool tonight. I’d suggest your warmest overcoat.”

After the man exits, Edward chucks the lifebelts on the floor.

“We should put them on, if he says,” Serena says. “We should go.”  

The man left the door open. Edward slams it shut and curls his hand around the handle.

“You think I’m just going to let you run back to your thieving scum of a female lover? You’re not going anywhere near her for the rest of this journey. I won’t have you humiliate me, and flaunt it to every passenger on this ship that has eyes.”

“Funnily enough, Edward. My relationship with Bernie had nothing to do with you.”

“Your relationship with that _woman_ is finished.”

“I know you had one of your men put the diamond in her coat. I don’t know where you had her taken but I will find her.”

“She’ll be handcuffed. Under arrest for the rest of the journey. A police officer will meet her as soon as we dock.”

“I’ll tell them the truth.”

“They won’t believe you. They won’t believe some scoundrel and her whore.”

“I’ll make them. Now,” Serena picks up a lifebelt. “Let me past.”

Edward laughs. “Not a chance."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up folks, because we are in for one hell of a ride now. Prepare for twists & turns in the road. 
> 
> P.S. I'm always a slut for comments.


	6. Chapter 6

There is a hammer on the door. “Sir? Madam?”

Edward moves from the door to let another crew member in.

“Good, you’ve got your lifebelts,” the man remarks. “Now, please I insist you make your way up.”

This time the man won’t leave until they do.

“This isn’t over,” Edward warns Serena as they leave the cabin. He hooks an arm through hers. He is not letting her out of his sight.

-

Upstairs, people clamour. Some confused, some distressed. Some merely annoyed. People complain. People chatter. They gossip and order their maid to go set up a fire for later.

Edward grips Serena’s arm tight. He will not have her run off to _that_ woman.

He tells her as much. Tells her that from now on things are going to change. From now on he expects her to act like a wife. He expects her to socialise. To actually talk to other people. To go to dinners. To _fucking_ smile for once.

Serena doesn’t listen. He can hold her as tight as he wishes, but he can’t hold on forever. Once they dock, she will leave him. She will never see his face again if she has her way.

Serena waits in the crowded room, mind preoccupied with thoughts of Paris, thoughts of Bernie. She plots her escape and waits.

A man announces that they are escorting women and children to the lifeboats. They should calmly let them through.

Serena, like the rest of the passengers, realises that this was never a precaution. If they are escorting people into lifeboats, the impossible is truly happening. Panic seizes her heart.

People start to surge forward. Bodies crush bodies. Within the chaos, Serena takes her chance. Pulls forward as if to follow the throngs of women and children. Edward loosens her arm. Loses her in the crowd. But she doesn’t go above, to the boats. She takes the stairs down.

She must find Bernie.

-

“You stupid woman!”

Serena doesn’t need to turn to her head to know Edward’s followed her. He has caught up with her. It’s been minutes, but it feels like hours. She has ran through the dining hall, through corridor after corridor, checked numerous rooms. But hasn’t found Bernie. She could be anywhere on this ship.

Serena is at the end of a corridor, at the top of stairs. Water laps at the toes of her feet. It has filled the rooms ahead of her and it rapidly climbs higher and higher. She has nowhere to go but to turn back. Search somewhere else.

“Tell me where she is,” Serena whips her head around to face Edward. “Tell me where you had her taken!”

“You won’t find her.”

“Watch me."

“It’s underwater,” Edward points past Serena, to flooded rooms. A smirk flickers at the edge of his lips. “It was down there.”

“Then,” Serena says, “she must have gone above.”

“My man wouldn’t have let her leave the room.”

Serena ignores him. Strides forward. By now, Bernie must be on the top deck. Like so many of the other passengers.

"Serena!"

Edward seizes Serena's hand. Stops her. 

“Why did you follow me?" Serena asks, snatching her hand back. 

“Perhaps, because I don’t want my wife to drown out of her own sheer idiocy. There are boats Serena. You need to get in one.”

“Why do you care?”

With that she marches off. Back the way she came. Back to top deck.

-

Bernie groans. Opens her eyes. The world is tilted. She eases herself up, sits up against the wall. The world rights itself.

That damn bastard, Bernie curses.

He had barely dragged her down one corridor when she broke free from his grip.

When she sprang back. Sprang forward. When her fist connected with his face.

He didn’t much like that.

But Bernie didn't look back at his face for confirmation as she ran away.

He had raced after her. It took him several minutes, but Bernie had to applaud the bastard’s determination when he finally tracked her down. Pummelled a fist into her gut. Then her face. Returned the favour.

She sank unconsciousness to the floor.

Now, as Bernie rises to her feet, he’s nowhere to be found. She looks to her left, squints. Surely, that’s not – she blinks rapidly, it must be concussion, she thinks, as she sees water creeping across the floor.

But she blinks, and it doesn’t disappear.

She sprints down the corridor.

Serena, she thinks. She must find her.

-

When Serena reaches the top deck, everything is in tumult. There are yells and cries. There are the wails of infants. There are the crew barking orders to lower the boats.

Serena pushes past people. Her eyes frantically scan the crowd. She calls Bernie’s name, but it gets lost in the cacophony of voices. She must be here, Serena thinks. She must be somewhere. She spots a mop of blonde hair. Runs towards it. Her heart drops in her stomach when the woman turns around and it isn’t Bernie.

But she can’t give up. Bernie’s must be here. Somewhere.

Maybe she revealed that she was a woman. Maybe she got in a boat.

Maybe she’s safe.

Serena barrels her way through the crowds, to the side of the ship where they are lowering the boats. She can’t find Bernie’s face amongst the crying women and children.

Serena feels tears burn her eyes. A lump forms in her throat. What if she can't find Bernie?

Terror pulses through her, but she tries to swallow the lump in her throat. Tries to blink back the tears. She will try the other side of the ship. Bernie will be there.

Edward’s clamps a hand on her shoulder. Holds her in place. Again.

“Get your hands off me!”

“No, Serena, get in a boat.”

“Get your hands off me now before – “

“Look at you,” Edward stares down at his wife's dishevelled hair, at the locks slipping from their pins, at the tears slipping down her face. “You’re a mess.”

“Here,” he takes off his coat and wraps it around her. His voice is soft, caring.

Serena is confused. That is until she sees the man, in uniform, that is watching them. Edwards turns to him.

“Please, my wife won’t go," Edward pleads, "She suffers with hysteria, her mind it’s not . . .”

Serena can’t believe what he’s saying, until she can, until Edward suggests that he should go with her. In the boat. Comfort her. Take care of her.

Before she can protest, the crew member waves his hand at Edward. Cuts off his pleas. "Sorry, sir, only women and children at the moment.”

“But we had a deal,” Edward hisses, “the money . . .”

The man ignores him. Hoists Serena into the boat. “Come on now.”

“Wait, no . . .”

Serena tries to resist, but it’s no use. She must grasp the outstretched hands of the woman already in the boat to stop herself from falling.

“No.”

It is barely a whisper on her lips. This can’t be real, she thinks, as she hears the order for the lowering of the boat. As she hears the creak of the ropes. This can’t be real.

She can’t leave, not without Bernie.

Serena watches Edward overhead. Staring down at her. She sees his face twist into a scowl as another person, one with blonde hair, jostles him aside.

Just as the boat begins to lower, Serena sees Bernie’s face. Serena stands up. Bernie’s eyes widen. “Serena, no!”

Serena jumps. Clutches on to the side of the ship. She isn’t leaving without Bernie. She lifts an arm, reaches for Bernie. Grasps her hand. Serena raises her other arm so Bernie can hook her own arms under Serena’s and lift her up and over.

A woman in the boat below tugs at Serena’s ankle. Shrieks that she’ll turn the boat over. In the split second between Serena letting go of the side of the ship and Bernie reaching to grip her, the woman tightens her fingers around Serena’s ankle and yanks.

Serena falls. She hears Bernie yell her name, but everything else is a whirl. One second she is clinging to the ship, trying to heave herself up, into Bernie’s arms, the next second she is falling.

She hits her head.

Black eclipses her vision.

-

She wakes up in the middle of the Atlantic in the pitch black of night. She slowly opens her eyes. Her head throbs. In the darkness, she discerns the faces of the strangers in the boat with her, white-faced and silent.

“The ship?” Is all Serena can get out. Her lips are cracked. It is painful to talk. Every letter requires energy she doesn’t have.

“It went down a few minutes after,” a woman replies. “We were the last boat to leave.”

Serena wants to scream, but she isn’t sure she could even make the sound. She wishes she never regained consciousness. She has never felt cold like this. The sleeves of Edward’s coat are too long for her and the ends cover her fingers, but her hands are frozen. It hurts to try and uncurl her fingers, but she does, lifting her hands and tucking them underneath her armpits. She clamps her arms around herself.

The cold feels like it is her bones. Piercing through every nerve.

She wants to sleep, and never wake up. She wants to catch the cold, and never recover.

Serena closes her eyes.

She doesn’t want to see the ocean that surrounds her. She doesn’t want to imagine all the people underneath it.

Maybe the woman got it wrong. Maybe they weren’t the last boat. Maybe there was another boat. One with Bernie on.

Even as Serena thinks it, she doesn’t believe it.

She succumbs to sleep. Dreams of Paris. Dreams of Bernie.

Hopes for death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END
> 
> Just kidding. :) 
> 
> I bet you weren't expecting that though.
> 
> Thank you for all your comments! They keep me going! I enjoy your speculation immensely.


	7. Chapter 7

_1916_

The war isn’t over by Christmas. It isn’t over by the next one either. It feels like it will never be over. Every day she rises before dawn, stitches up broken bodies and crawls into bed just before midnight. She joined up the day after war was declared. It is her whole life now. War.

She has earned a reputation for her tough leadership and her rapid-fire instructions, but not for her bedside manner. In surgery, she is brusque and efficient. To the nurses under her command, she is a force that inspires respect, but not exactly confidence. She is not here to childmind, they were told the first day of training. She is not here for petty complaints or childish squabbles. Her nurses are a team. They work together. They look out for each other and they do their very best for their patients. They do whatever they need.

Bernie is woken from her sleep by a rap on her door. She opens it and finds Harriet on her doorstep in a state of absolute disarray – something Bernie abhors in the appearance of her nurses. Their uniform must be immaculate and as for how they present themselves at night, she hoped that common decency and a sense of pride would prevail and stop them gallivanting through the tents in the dead of night looking like a banshee.

Harriet’s hair is loose, her long brown hair whipped into turmoil by the wind. Her cheeks are flushed. Her breathing ragged. Bernie knows Harriet has been running – another thing she abhors. Another thing that would earn a severe reprimand off her. But Bernie does not rebuke. She sees the terror in Harriet’s eyes and the tears streaming her face and listens to her. Pulls on shoes. Grabs her coat and bag. Follows the girl to her tent.

“It’s my sister,” the girl pants. “It’s Rita. She begged us not to fetch you but, please, please help her. We think she’s dying.”

-

After Bernie was rescued from the Atlantic, she caught pneumonia and lay ensconced in a strange bed in America for weeks. An elderly woman who had been in the same boat that had taken Bernie to safety had kindly looked after her. Given her shelter, when Bernie had none – had nothing, not a single penny, to her name. She had nothing to give the woman in thanks when she had recovered and was ready to leave.

The elderly woman had smiled. Her eyes had creased at the corners as she took Bernie’s hand and patted it.

“You can give me one thing. The lost woman whose name you kept calling in your sleep, you can find her for me.”

“How did you know she was lost?”

The woman tapped her nose. "You must love her a lot.”

“I do,” Bernie said without thinking. “She’s my sister.”

“If you say so.” The woman’s eyes glinted. “If you say so, my dear.”

-

And Bernie did what the woman asked. She searched for Serena. God, did she search. But it was difficult. Bernie had no money – she refused the packet of notes the woman tried to sneak into her hand before she left – and no possessions. Nothing. She scraped by for months, finding whatever work she could within New York. She searched for Serena there. Found no leads. She searched further away. The name Serena Campbell must have fallen from her lips innumerable times as she questioned person after person, hunted for leads and scoured for any clue as to where she might be.

In the June of 1913, the report of a blue diamond – 56 carat – hit the global newspaper headlines. It had wound up in Paris. Landed in the hands of a wealthy businessman. One who would not disclose his seller, no matter what. Speculation that he acquired the jewel through illegal means, that the diamond had passed from one black market to the next, was rife.

Bernie contacted the publishers of the article. Sent letter after letter, but received no reply. She contacted the business man through telephone – having practically begged an employer to borrow theirs in lieu of three weeks’ wages – in the hope that whoever answered couldn’t just ignore her like they could throw a letter away.

Bernie couldn’t make it past the business man’s secretary. Her accent was thick. Parisian.

The diamond had likely passed from hand to hand, could have crossed the globe, since Serena had sold it, but Paris, Bernie dared to hope, couldn’t be a coincidence.

She brought a ticket to France.

Didn’t find Serena, but found the city she had once loved so well. The longer she stayed, the more it's glamour seemed to fade. It was in Paris that Bernie heard the announcement of war. 

-

“I’m so so sorry,” Rita is hunched over in bed. She is cradling her stomach. “I’m so sorry.”

“How long since the pain started?” Bernie asks.

“This evening,” Harriet supplies. “Around seven o’clock.”

“And you didn’t think to seek help?”

“Rita was too scared. She didn’t want anyone to find out.”

“I just wanted to take care of it myself,” Rita sobs. “I thought I could take of it myself.”

“It’s the Colonel’s, Matron.” Harriet says. Bernie knows the Colonel, her superior, is 53. She knows that Rita is 20.

“Rita, I’m going to take a look at you.” Bernie places her hands on the girl’s legs. She isn’t a midwife, and if even if she hadn’t trained as a Doctor, she could tell from the blood pooling the sheets. Rita is losing the baby.

“Am I going to go to hell? Is my baby going to hell?” Rita’s whole body is shaking. Her voice is weak.

“No,” Bernie tells her, firmly.

“But – “

“No,” she clutches Rita’s hand. “And you’re going to stay alive for me. That’s an order.”

Barely a minute later, Bernie feels Rita's wrist for a pulse. Hears Harriet scream her sister’s name.

-

“What are we going to do?” Harriet’s voice is faint as she brushes her sister’s hair. “What will I tell people?”

“I’ll sort it,” Bernie promises. “No one will know the truth.” Together, her and Harriet have cleaned the room. Stripped the bed. They have undressed, bathed and redressed Rita. Bernie did it mechanically, like any other patient. Any other dead soldier. She had to, otherwise, she would have collapsed on the floor in tears.

Harriet is quiet. Bernie expects her to sob, but she hasn’t. Not once. She doesn’t think it has sunk in yet for the girl. Harriet finishes brushing her sister’s hair and sets the comb on the side table. She drifts over to Bernie.

“Thank you.”

Harriet steps forward and rises on her toes. Brushes her lips against Bernie’s. Her lips are cold and stiff, but they linger on Bernie’s mouth. Bernie lets them – just this once. She doesn’t move back until Harriet does, glass-eyed and pale-faced.

“What will I do now?” Harriet’s voice is a whisper.

It is the exact same words she yelled at Bernie when, a month ago, Bernie led Harriet into her office, shut the door and told her that this couldn’t go on anymore. They could no longer see each other – outside of what they normally would as colleagues.

“What will I do now?”

“I’m your superior,” Bernie answered as if that explained it all. “I should have never let it begin.”

“I don’t accept that,” Harriet shouted. Infuriated by Bernie’s sudden crisis of conscience, one she never seemed to have when Harriet was in her bed. 

“Well, you have to. Otherwise I will have to find you another post.” Stood behind her desk, Bernie folded her arms.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. This ends, Nurse Lockwood. Today.”

“How can you be so cold? How can you talk as if it was nothing? Nine months.”

“I’m sorry, but –"

“You’re not sorry!” Harriet threw her hands up into the air. “Did you ever love me?”

Bernie was silent.

“Did you?”

Bernie’s eyes dropped to her desk so she didn't have to watch the tears spring in Harriet’s eyes as she storms out, slamming the door shut.

“No,” Bernie says, trailing the spirals of wood on her desk with her fingertips. No.

And she hates herself for it, but it is the truth. She feels she owes Harriet at least that.

-

They never talk about the kiss.

They never talk about what happened that night after Rita is buried.

Harriet leaves for home and Bernie never sees her again.

Bernie’s not sure she believes in God, in anyone or anything, watching over them after this war but, on Christmas Eve, Bernie kneels at the end of her bed and murmurs a prayer for Rita and her baby.

She places her hands flat against her stomach.

She was 17 when she courted the lad, Robert, who worked at the butcher’s two streets away from her home. He always smelled of blood, Bernie remembers, even after he hung up his overcoat and apron and scrubbed his hands clean. She was the only girl he knew who didn’t grow faint at the sight of blood or didn’t run away as he cut up hunks of pork or plucked the feathers off dead chickens. I’m not scared of blood, Bernie had told him, I want to be a Doctor. Robert laughed. Thought she was humouring him.

Bernie knew she didn’t love him. Knew that she would never love him. She didn’t know why, though. She didn’t know why his smiles, charming and handsome to so many of the other young girls in the town, she thought nice only because of his good teeth. She didn’t know why his kisses, those magical, wondrous things she’d read about in novels, left her cold.

She didn’t know why some part of her wished for him to smile at her or to call her handsome or to kiss her. Not when it all felt so wrong. Maybe she wanted it to feel right. Maybe that’s why she let him take her to bed.

Bernie wasn’t scared of blood until it was her own. Until she heaved the bath tub up to her bedroom and locked herself in there and watched the water turn red. The woman said there would be cramps. Said there might be blood.

Bernie gripped the sides of the bathtub until her knuckles were white. She bit her lip until it bled. Stifled screams.

She was too frightened to tell anyone. She knew she should have begged Robert to marry her.  She knew she should have fought tooth and nail to get him to. But she didn’t.

She told no one. And the next morning, when dawn slipped through the curtains and Bernie realised she was still alive, the night remained a secret between her and the baby. She can’t bring herself to call it _her_ baby, _her_ child until years later. 

At 27, when her mother had despaired at forever having a spinster as a daughter, she married Marcus. She thought she loved him, and she did, in her own way – just not as a wife ought to love a husband. But she thought that kind of love enough. Marcus understood she never would be a traditional wife, that she would have her work as a Doctor and would never give it up for a man. He said he liked that about her, her strength of will – until they opened the clinic together and Bernie’s expertise was far too close to his own for his ego to withstand.

She didn’t tell him about the growing curve of her stomach. She thought he would think her unfit for work and forbid it for the sake of their baby’s health – use it as an excuse to get her out of _his_ clinic once and for all. Bernie, to this day, has no doubt he would have, but she regrets never giving him the chance to. Never telling him about the baby, until Marcus found her collapsed on the floor and she couldn’t hide it anymore.

This was punishment, she thought. This was her punishment for all those years ago. This was the world telling her that she didn’t deserve a second chance, but Bernie has cried into her pillow so many nights since then over why her little girl didn’t deserve her first chance, her first breathe in this world.

The house grew cold and silent. Marcus grew cold and silent. The air was thick and heavy between them, full of unsaid words and the cloying smell of dying lilies. Full of Bernie’s guilt. Full of her betrayal, as Marcus worded it. _How could you keep it a secret from me? Were you ever going to tell me? Look me in the eye, and tell me the truth, Bernie. You owe me that._

Bernie thought she would suffocate in that house. Felt it would shrink and shrink like a cage, crushing her bone by bone, until she couldn’t breathe.

On the anniversary of her daughter’s death, she threw clothes into a suitcase. Shut the door of the house behind her. Ran and hasn’t stopped since.

 -

When war ends, Bernie is buoyed by the sheer relief that courses through her body. She is renewed with a sense of hope. A sense of faith in this world – this broken world, half mud, half ruins. She wonders, in this new world, where Serena is.

She hires a Private Investigator.

Three, four, five months in – nothing. He finds leads that look promising, but quickly shrivel into the air like cigarette smoke. He blames it on the global upheaval of the war. So many have changed address. Bernie gives him another month – she is paying him a small fortune – before letting him go.

She uses up nearly every penny she owns on hiring another investigator, a Mr Hanssen. Even more expensive than the last, but with a formidable reputation. He grills her for all the information Bernie knows – so exacting are his questions, so intense his stare – ‘ _and please describe to me your exact connection with Ms Campbell’_ – that Bernie stumbles through her words. Terrified he might work out her connection with Serena, a bit too _exactly_ , she lies. Tells him a story that is half-true, half false. She tells him how she was travelling with her sister on the Titanic. How they were separated. How she has spent seven years looking for her. She tells him how Serena was married to an Edward Campbell – how he was listed as amongst the deceased after the tragic accident, how she was not.

Mr Hanssen does not indicate in any way, at least verbally, that he finds Bernie’s lack of knowledge suspicious. She does not know, for example, how long Serena was married to Edward Campbell. Cannot say for certain whether they have any children, alive or deceased. Cannot provide any address for where the Campbells resided in England, or for where they were due to emigrate. She tells him that Serena has a nephew, Jason, but cannot give any surname. All she has are scraps of information. 

She is left feeling useless, despite Hanssen’s promise that he will commence the search immediately. He watches Bernie’s less than hopeful expression. He shakes her hand and assures her that he uses only the most thorough methods in his research. Despite the sincerity in his eyes, Bernie leaves his office downtrodden. The hope she felt dies to a flicker. Is it all but extinguished when seven weeks later, she receives a letter off Hanssen.

He searched like the Private Investigator before him, like Bernie before him, but he searched with one difference. Or rather, pursued one new avenue.

He searched for a Ms Serena Wolfe. And he’s found her.

-

On the passage to America, Bernie starts to experience head-aches. Bouts of nausea. She brushes it off as mere seasickness at first. Something that will pass as she grows accustomed to the motion of the ship, but it doesn’t. The headaches turn to migraines. The bouts of nausea confine her to her cabin. She barely eats. Can’t keep anything down for long. She sleeps for hours on end. Days blend into nights, nights into days. She thinks she hears a knock on her cabin door, when there is none. Thinks she hears someone calling her name, when they aren’t.

She can no longer tell what is real or what is real.

The day after the ship docks, her skull feels as if it is crushing her brain. Her body shakes with shivers, despite the summer heat. The streets and the houses and their doors sway in front of her. Darkness seeps into the corners of her vision, dancing black dots that grow and cloud and eclipse everything else.

After an indeterminable amount of time, she drifts back into consciousness. Her surroundings appear to move in waves, flutters of colour and light that refuse to shape into lines. Into any clarity. This is a dream, she vaguely registers. A space between life and death as she slides from one state to the next and Serena is here, she thinks – as her face appears before her, looks down upon her – to lead her on.

Bernie thinks this is the last sight will imagine. This memory of Serena, disappearing as Bernie sinks back into unconsciousness.

But it isn’t a memory and Bernie isn’t dying.

Serena leans over her, presses a towel to her head. Nurses her wordlessly. Determinedly. Bernie isn’t dying. Serena won’t let her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do love comments. Who doesn't?
> 
> I have written Chapter Eight and I really hope you find it a good reward for slogging through all this sapphic drama.


	8. Chapter 8

Bernie blinks. Rubs sleeps out her eyes. The blanket above her is soft and unfamiliar. She pushes it down to her waist and finds herself clad in a dress, again unfamiliar. Gingerly, she sits up in the bed and surveys the room. The curtains are shut, but a late afternoon sun leaks through into a clean and neat room, bare apart from a bed, chair, chest of drawers and wardrobe.

The yellow haze of the room appears dream-like and Bernie wonders if she’s truly woke up. She remembers knocking on a door and seeing Serena’s face behind it. She remembers the sensation of falling. Then, blackness. She remembers seeing this room before, the outline of the furniture blurred and swimming in front of her eyes. She remembers someone murmuring words, soothing as a lullaby, in her ear but she can’t remember what. She remembers drifting back into darkness. She remembers Serena’s face being the last thing she saw.

“Hello.”

Bernie looks up to see a man in his twenties standing in front of her.

“I’m Jason. Would you like some water?”

Bernie accepts the cup he passes her. Realises just how thirsty she is and nearly finishes the glass.

“You're Jason?"

He nods.

“Oh my God, she found you.”

“Auntie Serena will want to know you’re up. I should go and tell her.”

“Wait. One second,” Bernie stops him. “How long was I . . . how long have I been here?”

“Two weeks, five days.” Jason consults his watch. “17 hours and 46 minutes.” He grins. “Auntie Serena said that if you woke up I should tell her as soon as possible.”

Bernie feels her heart flutter. Speed up. This is real, she thinks. She is in Serena’s house. She found her. Bernie takes a breath and rises out of bed.

“Where is she?”

-

Bernie finds Serena in the garden. She is crouched down on her knees, hands deep in soil as she plots plants.

Her hair is a shock of silver. Cropped short and neat to her scalp so that her ears poke out. Bernie smiles. She remembers Serena running her fingers through Bernie’s short hair with jealously. She remembers Serena grumbling how easy it must be for her, to not have to deal with, well, all this – Serena motioned to her own long hair, curls wild and unruly, mused up from the sex, from Bernie’s hands.

Seven years later and Bernie is the one with long hair. When she served as a nurse, she always knotted it back. Only unravelled it for bed or a bath. When peace was declared, it reached to the middle of her back. She’s cut it since. To her collarbone. She likes it like that. Even if strands of grey, and not just the one or two, weave their way through the blonde of her hair. During the war, there was no time to care that her body was ageing – and apart from when her back insisted on reminding her that she was nearing fifty through a sharp, shooting pain down her spine – she didn’t take much notice.

When night came her feet throbbed with the ache of never sitting down since breakfast and her fingers stung, the skin cracked and rough from the periodic rub of soap, but sleep claimed her before she could dwell on it. Once there was soft surface under her back and her head, it didn’t take long for her eyes to close.

Her body needed sleep and it was stupid to deprive it of the little she got by staying awake to think. At the end of some days, however –  the most horrific days – when they’d lost too many men or saved them, only to watch agony contort their face when they woke up and saw stumps where legs once were, on these days Bernie had to take time to clear her head. To curse this fucking war, to curse the fucking Germans and their fucking gas and their fucking guns. And then she had to breathe. She had to let go of everything she had saw that day, all the blood and everything she had heard, all the screams. She had to try and make sure it didn’t follow her into sleep.

On the rare occasion, she thought of Serena. Etched out those faded memories in her mind. Three, four, five years on and they grew fainter and fainter. As if they were drawn on a piece of paper, crumpled and yellowed with age and torn at the edges, they began to disintegrate. Bernie remembered the sparkle of Serena’s laugh, but not the cadence of her voice. She remembered the delicate lace panel at the back of her dress the first night they met, but not the skirt. She remembered the gleam of the diamond at her neck that morning in her cabin, but when Bernie tried to draw Serena she could never quite catch the gleam in her eyes.

Over the years, she’s drawn Serena several times. The more detailed sketches – of Serena, sitting on a bench, staring out to sea or smiling at Bernie, breathless from dancing – Bernie tore up and threw in a fire just before she joined the Territorial Force Nursing Service. She wanted a clean break, to force herself to accept that Serena was lost to her, to try and comfort herself with the fact that she was alive in 1912 and very likely was now, even if Bernie had no clue where.

She’s never stopped regretting destroying the drawings.

When in 1918, she picked up a pencil again, there was only scraps of memory to work from. The dimple in Serena’s chin or the slant of her lips. An outline of her face or a rough silhouette of her form. But nothing substantial or whole. The harder Bernie tried to conjure up the vision of Serena in her mind, the more it faded. The more of Serena was lost to her.

All those imaginings don’t come close to what Bernie sees now, Serena here and real and right in front of her. Serena, bathed in sunlight, with sweat glistening on her forehead and dirt smeared on her sun-reddened cheeks.

Bernie doesn’t think she’s seen a more beautiful sight.

Not only is Serena now the one of them with short hair, she’s the one in men’s clothes. Those bloomers she always wanted to try on look far more comfortable than any dress. Bernie wonders if she wears them just for gardening. She looks different in them. She looks good in them.

And the clothes don’t look like men’s clothes, Bernie thinks, they look like Serena’s clothes. In a way the long, narrow dresses never did. The shirt she wears is loose and oversized, but Bernie can still discern the curve of breasts and hips beneath it, the undeniable shape of her femininity. 

Her curves are fuller than there were. Her face is a lot less gaunt. Bernie remembers Serena always missing meals, excusing herself from dinners with headaches and other ills. They had dinner together the once, the second night on the ship, but Bernie can’t recall seeing Serena touch her plate.

Tears sparkle in her eyes as she watches Serena garden. She looks healthy. She looks happy. And she’s alive, dear God, she’s so alive.

They both are.

“Serena.” It comes out quieter than Bernie intended. The syllables feel strange around her lips, unused for so many years. She feels as if she must practice them. Refamiliarize herself with them. “Serena!”

Serena looks up. Raises an eyebrow. “You’re not meant to be up from bed.”

But all thought of chastising Bernie disappears as Bernie runs over to kneel on the grass beside her. She cups Serena’s face with her hands.

“You’re really here,” Bernie breathes.

“I’m really here.”

As if she can barely believe the fact – thinking that Serena might float away at any second and gradually, but surely disappear bit by bit like Bernie’s memories of her, Bernie brushes her lips over Serena’s. Serena deepens the kiss, throwing her arms around Bernie and clinging tight. Crushing their mouths together, crushing their bodies together. Serena kisses her as she will never need air again.

When, however, she does, when they both do, they break apart and rest their foreheads against each other. A tear slips down Serena’s face and wets her lip. Bernie tastes it when Serena presses hard, desperate kisses to her mouth, then to her face, her jawline, peppering kisses all the way up to her ear before burying her face into the crook of Bernie’s neck. Bernie’s hands rub her back as Serena sobs into her shirt.

When Serena draws back, sees that the shoulder of Bernie’s dress is dark with tears.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, wiping her eyes.

“Don’t be.” Bernie trails her fingers through Serena’s hair. “I’ve been wanting to do that for years.”

Serena smiles despite the tear-tracks on her cheeks. “Well, you,” she jabs a finger, mock-accusatory, at Bernie, “ _you_ nearly died.”

“More than once. Remind me. Which time are we talking about?”

Serena fixes Bernie with a _that isn’t even remotely funny_ look. The reprimand dies on her lips, however, when she sees Bernie eyes, how warm and earnest they are.

“But I’m here now,” Bernie murmurs, “because of you. Jason told me what you did. Thank you.”

“Had to return the favour somehow. Now we’re equals.”

“Yeah, about the whole you nursing me back to health thing, which I’m extremely grateful for, I do have one question.”

“Yes?”

“Jason said I was in bed for days.” Bernie gestures to the borrowed dress she wears. “Who dressed me?”

“I had to give you something of mine. You arrived with only the clothes on your back.”

“Yes, but you must have –”

“ _Un_ dressed you first, yes. Bernie, I think you forget. I have, shall we say, been down that street before. Surely, you haven’t forgotten.”

“Never,” Bernie promises. Her eyes drift down at Serena’s lips. Leans in.

“Auntie Serena!” Both turn to see Jason staring down at them. “Is Bernie going to be staying with us now she’s better?”

“I bloody hope so,” Serena says before thinking. “Of course, Bernie, that’s if you . . . want to?”

“Only if you – I mean – I would like, I would more than like –”

“Is that a yes?” Jason interrupts.

“Ummm –” Bernie looks to Serena for help.

“We need to talk about it. But I promise you, by tomorrow morning I will give you an answer. If it is a yes,” Serena toys the pendant at her neck, “would you . . . would you mind?”

“No,” Jason replies briskly. “She hasn’t really been any trouble so far – even if she did steal your bed – and as long as she doesn’t go into my room and touch my stamp collection, or forget to wash up the plates in the kitchen, like you sometimes do, then I think she can stay. Would you like some time now to talk about it?”

“Yes, umm, thank you.” Serena smiles as he strides away, heart filling with affection for her nephew. “Sorry,” she says to Bernie, “not for Jason, I should have talked to him before, should have known he would want to know how much things might change.”

“That’s okay. It’s him home. I was the one who collapsed on your doorstep.”

“Yes,” Serena chuckles. “You certainly made an entrance.”

Serena remembers opening the door. Finding Bernie, white-faced and painfully thin, practically swaying on the spot. Before Serena could utter a word, Bernie was in her arms and Serena was steadying her, trying to manoeuvre them both inside. She felt Bernie lose conscious completely. Felt her become a dead weight in her arms. Serena carefully lowered her body to the floor.

Jason appeared at the end of the hallway. Found his Auntie deathly pale and wordless, kneeling beside an unconscious stranger. Normally, she would speak to them – anyone who fainted. She would speak to them and ask if they could here and examine them. Jason had watched her countless times, but Serena remained motionless.

“Auntie Serena? Are you okay? You should probably –”

“I’m fine, I just . . .” Serena rose to her feet.

“You don’t look very well You’re look like you’re going –”

As he said it, Serena felt the room spin around her and clutched the bannister of the stairs for support.

“Jason . . .  I think you’re right.” Serena leant back against the wall. Slid down it and to her knees. Breathed deeply.

“Who is she?” Jason asked.

“Bernie. Bernie Wolfe.”

“You thought she was dead.”

“I did. But turns out,” Serena replied, through deep, focused breathes, “she’s not.”

-

“It must have been a shock,” Bernie says, before sipping her cup of tea. They have moved to sit in the kitchen, on account of not being as young as they were and the protesting creak of knees.

“And a half,” Serena agrees. “But the best kind.”

“Jason said I stole your bed.”

“I gave it to you. We only have two bedrooms. You were my patient. And as he said, Jason would not have liked you messing up his stamp collection.”

“He’s seems . . .”

“Different?”

“I was going to say particular.”

“He is. Jason’s . . . “ Serena struggles for words. For a way to communicate to Bernie both the joy and challenge Jason has brought to her life. To explain how wonderful he is, how honest, how clever, how charming. But also, to explain the ways in which he’s different.

“When did you find him?”

“I didn’t. I was going to look for him,” Serena explains. “I really was, but it was just after . . . my world had turned upside down, I needed time to – oh God Bernie, I thought you were dead,” Serena’s voice cracks, but she thinks they’ve had enough tears for today so she swallows the lump in her throat. “I kept thinking why did I survive? Why did so many not? Why was I so special?”

“You can’t think like that.”

“I did. I went to the house Edward brought for us in New York. I’d never seen it before. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t mine. It didn’t feel like my house. It didn’t feel like I deserved it. But I stayed there. Had nowhere else to go. I lived there for two weeks like a ghost. Just slept. Just wanted to sleep.”

“You didn’t erm . . .”

“Try anything? No, no. I mean all that . . . inside my head, it didn’t get better overnight, but I’d been given a second chance. Even if I felt I didn’t deserve it, I felt I couldn’t waste it.”

“You do deserve this,” Bernie gestures to the house. “You deserve to be happy here with your nephew. Have you been happy?”

Serena hesitates for a second. She has lost her daughter, her mother, and she had thought, for seven years, the woman she loved too. She’d come to terms with that, slowly, gradually, but not completely – she doesn’t think if she’ll ever come to terms with it all completely, but she’s okay with that. And she doesn’t know if she’s been happy, but she knows for sure she’s been content here with Jason.

She tells Bernie how he found her. His mother, before she passed, had told her she had a sister, he an Aunt. Jason knew of her and when he saw a Serena Campbell reported alive in the newspapers after the Titanic disaster, he searched for her. He found out her address and he sent her a letter.

He lived in Canada. His mother emigrated there in the 1880s. When she passed, Jason lived with their neighbour, Alan. If it hadn’t been for Alan, when Serena continued correspondence with Jason, when Serena asked if she could visit and Jason accepted, Serena knows she wouldn’t have handled things as she did. It was difficult with Jason, at first. For a while, if she was honest. She wasn’t used to his ways. Sometimes she forgot to stick to his schedule. Sometimes she shouted, and didn’t realise until Jason’s distress was visible. Sometimes she just said the wrong things.

But Jason was her family. She’d grown fond of him during their letters and she grew fonder in Canada. He was sweet and he was caring and Serena knew she didn’t want to let him go. She followed all of Alan’s advice. She learnt Jason’s routines. She learnt what he liked and what he didn’t. She built a relationship with him, brick by brick.

Jason made her world so much brighter, so much more wonderful.

And she didn’t want to return to America when her visit was over. She didn’t want to have to leave. She got her wish. In a way. Alan grew sick. He was unable to look after Jason for two months. Serena stayed with them. Alan refused to let her pay for a doctor, but she insisted. He had been like a father to Jason for years. It was only when Serena told him that Jason was terrified of losing a father as well as a mother, and that he likely could if Alan didn’t get help, that the proud man relented.

Serena paid for a doctor. She cared for Jason and ran the household. Only then did she realise how bad their financial situation was. Taking care of Jason didn’t leave much time for Alan to find work. He found odd and end jobs. Took them when he could, but they weren’t enough.

When Alan recovered, Serena sat down with him. Offered to help. They had welcomed her into their house as a guest, and then as family. It was time she returned that support. She told him she had money. Led him to believe it was given to her when Edward died, and it was in a way. She had sold the diamond on the black market. She had wanted to get rid of, quickly, easily and for that she let it go for less than half it’s worth, but it was a still a remarkable sum.

And what was she going to do with it? All by herself. She didn’t need it, but her family did. She was relieved when Alan accepted her help. For Jason’s sake and only for Jason’s sake, he made clear. He asked if she was serious, if she would like to live with them, permanently.

Serena said she had a suggestion. Only a suggestion, and if Jason didn’t like it then she wouldn’t bring it up again, but the house they lived in now had seen better days and she felt that they were all due a fresh start. What did Alan think of America? Of them all moving there?

And they had, in the spring of 1914. Serena had been overjoyed when Jason had liked the idea, had agreed to the move, and she and Alan had both tried to make it as a smooth as possible. Of course, the emigration didn’t go with hiccup. Without several. They were teething problems, but they muddled through. They created a life that worked for them.

Serena and Jason lived in small house. Alan in a cottage next door. Jason spent his time between the both, half the week with Alan and half with Serena. Alan worked part-time in the grocery store in town with Jason helping every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, while Serena worked as a nurse. Of course, she had never trained, but she brought books and she studied voraciously. She didn’t work in any official capacity. She ran house-calls to families too impoverished to afford a doctor, did as best she could and never charged. She didn’t need the money and the families could not spare it.  

Over the years, she learnt the inside and outside of the community. She became a part of it. She enjoyed her work immensely. Found purpose in it. In helping people. It reminded her of when she volunteered in the rehabilitation homes for fallen women. It was tough at times and challenging without a doubt, juggling work and home and family but she wouldn’t have wished it any other way. Except perhaps, Serena thought as she looked over her mug of tea at Bernie, she’d also felt, deep down, that there was just one thing, or rather one person, missing.

She takes Bernie’s hand across the table. Squeeze it.

“Serena, Mr Williams has -” Alan trails off when he sees Bernie. “She’s awake.”

Bernie draws back her hand back from Serena’s at the stranger’s arrival. Feels herself go cold at being referred to in the third person.

“Bernie, this is Alan. Alan, this is Bernie,” Serena introduces.

“How do you do?” Alan turns to Bernie. “Feeling better I hope?”

“Quite.” Bernie smiles tightly.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have cut our introduction short. Serena, Mr Williams has fallen from his ladder. Broken leg. Nasty head wound. The family asked for you.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can.” Serena finishes off her tea with one last gulp. Grimaces at the taste of cold water.

“I’ll have a message sent,” Alan says, before leaving.

Serena calls her thanks. Stands up and places her mug in the sink. “Want to come with me?”

“To see Mr Williams?”

“No, the moon.” Serena teases. “I can always do with another pair of hands.”

“Sure,” Bernie agrees. “I’d loved to.”

“Wait.” Serena pauses in the doorframe. “Can you ride a bike?”

Bernie nods.

“Then we’ll get on splendidly.” Serena flashes a smile at Bernie, before reaching for a leather bag in the hallway.

-

As Bernie follows Serena on bicycle, she can’t help but voice the thoughts that have been gnawing at her gut since she met Alan.

“You said Alan was your neighbour?” Bernie calls ahead.

“Well, he’s family, but yes he lives next door.”

“Is he . . . umm . . . I mean for you all to move to America together and live together all these years, you must be close.”

“We are. We’re family.”

“So, you’re sort of like Jason’s mother and father?”

“I suppose.”

“Bernie, I don’t see where you’re –”

Bernie takes a deep breath and bites the bullet. “Are you and him – I mean – are you . . . more than just . . .”

Serena stops her bike. Bernie _just_ manages not to crash into her. Serena turns back to Bernie, laughing. “God, no. We’re friends, Bernie. Family. But he’s like a brother to me.”

“And he sees you as a sister?”

“I’d like to think so. As for anything else, I really doubt I would be his choice of companion.” Serena starts pedalling again. She’s aware that they can’t afford any more of a pause. They have a patient to get to. She cycles on, faster this time, and Bernie follows.

“Why wouldn’t he want you as a companion?” She must shout to get Serena’s attention.

“Because, well, you know some people like oranges and apples,” Serena calls back aware they are not alone, people mill outside the doors of pubs, close their shops for the day or simply walk past them on the street. “Some people like both, like me, for instance. But some others only like oranges, like you. Well he only likes apples.”

“I’m not following,” Bernie pedals harder. Comes up beside Serena so they are cycling side by side.

Serena drops her voice. Whispers. “He loves men Bernie.”

“Oh.”

“So, you have nothing to be jealous about.”

“I wasn’t jealous.”

“Well, you weren’t telling your face that back at the house.”

Bernie breaks into laughter. “I forgot how sharp your wit was.”

“I forgot how wonderful your laugh was.”

“I missed it,” they both say in unison, before laughing harder.

-

“Everything alright?” Serena knocks on the door. Stifles a yawn.

She can hear her own tiredness reflected in Bernie’s voice. “I’ll be five minutes.”

“Can I – can I come in?”

“Your house.”

“Yours too, if you want?” Serena wants to call through the door, but an uncertainness overcomes her. They knew each other for days. They have been apart for seven years. They have lived separate lives. Serena’s is hectic, despite the order she tries to adhere to for Jason. Her work is unpredictable and hard and has her out all hours. Sometimes you don’t get back till quarter to one in the morning. (They were called out again after Mr Williams, by a husband fearing his wife had the influenza. Thankfully, he was wrong. She was in the grip of a fever, but with rest, with medicine, the odds looked good. Serena arranged to visit her the next day.)

On the way back, Serena had told Bernie that her first thought was the Spanish flu. It’s spread across Europe. You hear people dying of it day after day. Everyone fears it. Serena told Bernie how she assumed the worst. As she got her into a bed, she was already thinking of sending Jason’s to Alan’s, further away if possible, so he was not at risk as Serena tended to Bernie.

“You would have exposed yourself to the influenza for a stranger?”

“You were my patient. And you’re not a stranger.”

Serena remembers the smile her words had drew from Bernie, bright and wide. She pushes open the door.

“I changed the sheets,” Serena says. “Freshened up the room.”

“You should have let me help.” Bernie protests from behind the folding screen. It is in the far side of the room, next to the fireplace. Where Serena usually bathes.

“You’re still recovering. And you’re my guest.”

“Least now you can finally get your bed back.”

“I’ll do no such thing. Where would you sleep?”

“Where would you? Where have you been?”

“You know the armchair next to the bed?” Serena admits sheepishly. Looks down to hide the blush creeping up her next despite knowing Bernie can’t see hear.

“Really?”

“Most nights.”

Serena hears a gush of water as Bernie stands up from the bath. She tries her best not to imagine her behind the screen. Tries not to imagine her towelling her naked body. Fails spectacularly. So much so that when Bernie appears from behind the screen, clothed in more borrowed clothes, this time one of Serena’s nightgown, with her hair wet and curling around her shoulders, Serena gulps. The gown is loose on Bernie, but it sticks in places to her damp skin so that Serena can see the outline of her body beneath. The curve of her breasts, the sharp angle of her hips, the long length of her legs.

 _Stop it_ , Serena orders her brain. _Stop it. She’s your patient._ Another voice enters her head however: _before she was your patient she was your lover._

Serena skin flushes hot when Bernie looks at her, eyes earnest and shining. “How will I ever made it up to you?”

The low, gravelly tone of her voice – still a bit hoarse from the fever – shoots straight to the pit of Serena’s stomach. And lower.

 _Get a grip,_ Serena scolds herself. “No need. I told you. We’re equals now.” Bernie nears her and Serena inhales the sweet smell of soap. Her soap. On Bernie.

“I . . . erm . . .” Serena pulls at her necklace. “I really enjoyed today. Working with you.”

“Likewise,” Bernie smiles. “We make a good team.”

Bernie is still staring at her like _that_ , eyes wide, playful and innocent at the same time and Serena knows she has only so much reserve of will – and it is rapidly running out. She steps back, to the door. “I think it’s time we went to bed.”

Bernie’s eyebrows arch skywards. Her lips stretch into a grin.

 _Oh Christ,_ Serena inwardly curses. Of all words to use. “I mean, it’s late and we’re both exhausted and . . .” She stutters.

“Are you using the bath or do you want me to empty it?”

Serena waves a hand. “Leave it. I’ll sort in the morning. God knows I need one, but I’m so tired I’d probably end up falling asleep the second I get in.”

“Just bed, then?” Bernie asks.

“I’ll show you up.”

-

“Right then.” Serena picks up the basket of laundry she’d left in the room before making her way to the door. “If you need anything, I’ll be downstairs.”

“Right,” Bernie agrees, but before Serena can leave she wraps her arms around her waist. Startled, Serena drops the laundry as Bernie leads her backwards into the room, falls back to sit on the edge of the bed and pulls Serena into her lap.

“What are you doing?” Serena asks when she feels lips, hot and insistent on the skin of her neck.

“What does it look like? Trying to get the lady into bed.”

Serena leans back against Bernie’s, feels herself melting into the embrace. “As lovely as this is, I . . .” The breath rushes out her when Bernie’s hands skate up from her waist to brush the underside of her breasts. “We’re both too exhausted.”

“Speak for yourself,” Bernie quips.

Serena pulls Bernie’s wandering hands away. Turns her head to look at her.

“I want to wait,” Serena explains. “It’s just all so . . .”

“Overwhelming?”

“A bit,” Serena admits. Even though, over the years, she’d learnt to accept that Bernie was gone, her brain didn’t quite so easily. Every now and then again, she’d dream that Bernie was alive, that she’d survived, that they’d met again. And they have. Serena’s dreamt of this day. Of this moment. And she wants it to live up to the dreams. Wants it to surpass them. “I want to wait at least until there’s isn’t a danger I’ll fall asleep on you.”

Bernie laughs. “Alright, but promise me one thing?”

“What?”

“Stay.”

-

“Are you awake?” Serena whispers into the night, body pressed up against Bernie’s.

“It would seem so.” Bernie trails her fingertips across Serena’s arm, up to her elbow and back down again. “I thought you were tired.”

“I am. I’m just . . .  scared.”

“Scared?”

“It’s silly. I don’t want to wake up and . . . for you to be gone.”

“That’s fine then because I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

“And this isn’t a dream.”

“This isn’t a dream,” Bernie confirms. Runs her fingertips through Serena’s short, soft hair.

“Okay, but promise me one thing,” Serena reiterates Bernie’s earlier words. Squeezes Bernie’s hand. “Stay.”

“You mean here, with you and –”

“If you want.”

Bernie lifts herself up slightly. Leans over. Presses a kiss to Serena’s cheek. She settles back down on her side and Serena moves back, nestles in closer to her.

“Told you this bed was more than big enough for two people to share,” Bernie chuckles a couple of minutes later, expecting a quip back from Serena or a light swat on her arm. Neither comes. Serena has drifted into sleep, and Bernie – lulled by the promise of more nights to share, more days to share, the rest of their lives – soon follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Da-dum!!! 
> 
> We are officially finished folks. Hope you enjoyed this often WTF piece of fiction.
> 
> And please don't kill me if I tell you that they were ALWAYS staying alive and getting a happy ending, never in Paris but definitely in 1919 America. Where they will just so happen to invest in the booming stock markets during the roaring twenties, but stop well before the crash (don't you just love historical hindsight?) and use the money to open a clinic together.


End file.
